A Comparative Study of Histogram Equalization Based Image Enhancement Techniques for Brightness Preservation and Contrast Enhancement

Abstract

Histogram Equalization is a contrast enhancement technique in the image processing which uses the histogram of image. However histogram equalization is not the best method for contrast enhancement because the mean brightness of the output image is significantly different from the input image. There are several extensions of histogram equalization has been proposed to overcome the brightness preservation challenge. Contrast enhancement using brightness preserving bi-histogram equalization (BBHE) and Dualistic sub image histogram equalization (DSIHE) which divides the image histogram into two parts based on the input mean and median respectively then equalizes each sub histogram independently. This paper provides review of different popular histogram equalization techniques and experimental study based on the absolute mean brightness error (AMBE), peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), Structure similarity index (SSI) and Entropy.