Contrast enhancement via texture region based histogram equalization

Abstract

This paper presents two novel contrast enhancement approaches using texture regions-based histogram equalization (HE). In HE-based contrast enhancement methods, the enhanced image often contains undesirable artefacts because an excessive number of pixels in the non-textured areas heavily bias the histogram. The novel idea presented in this paper is to suppress the impact of pixels in non-textured areas and to exploit texture features for the computation of histogram in the process of HE. The first algorithm named as Dominant Orientation-based Texture Histogram Equalization (DOTHE), constructs the histogram of the image using only those image patches having dominant orientation. DOTHE categories image patches into smooth, dominant or non-dominant orientation patches by using the image variance and singular value decomposition algorithm and utilizes only dominant orientation patches in the process of HE. The second method termed as Edge-based Texture Histogram Equalization, calculates significant edges in the image and constructs the histogram using the grey levels present in the neighbourhood of edges. The cumulative density function of the histogram formed from texture features is mapped on the entire dynamic range of the input image to produce the contrast-enhanced image. Subjective as well as objective performance assessment of proposed methods is conducted and compared with other existing HE methods. The performance assessment in terms of visual quality, contrast improvement index, entropy and measure of enhancement reveals that the proposed methods outperform the existing HE methods.