Using weighted dynamic range for histogram equalization to improve the image contrast

Abstract

In this paper, an effective method, named the brightness preserving weighted dynamic range histogram equalization (BPWDRHE), is proposed for contrast enhancement. Although histogram equalization (HE) is a universal method, it is not suitable for consumer electronic products because this method cannot preserve the overall brightness. Therefore, the output images have an unnatural looking and more visual artifacts. An extension of the approach based on the brightness preserving bi-histogram equalization method, the BPWDRHE used the weighted within-class variance as the novel algorithm in separating an original histogram. Unlike others using the average or the median of gray levels, the proposed method determined gray-scale values as break points based on the within-class variance to minimize the total squared error of each sub-histogram corresponding to the brightness shift when equalizing them independently. As a result, the contrast of both overall image and local details was enhanced adequately. The experimental results are presented and compared to other brightness preserving methods.