A systematic approach for enhancement of homogeneous background images using structural information

Image enhancement is an indispensable pre-processing step for several image processing applications. Mainly, histogram equalization is one of the widespread techniques used by various researchers to improve the image quality by expanding the pixel values to fill the entire dynamic grayscale. It results in the visual artifact, structural information loss near edges due to the information loss (due to many-to-one mapping), and alteration in average luminance to a higher value. This paper proposes an enhancement algorithm based on structural information for homogeneous background images. The intensities are divided into two segments using the median value to preserve the average luminance. Unlike traditional techniques, this algorithm incorporates the spatial locations in the equalization process instead of the number of intensity values occurrences. The occurrences of each intensity concerning their spatial locations are combined using Rènyi entropy to enumerate a discrete function. An adaptive clipping limit is applied to the discrete function to control the enhancement rate. Then histogram equalization is performed on each segment separately, and the equalized segments are integrated to produce an enhanced image. The algorithm’s effectiveness is validated by evaluating the proposed method on CEED, CSIQ, LOL, and TID2013 databases. Experimental results reveal that the proposed method improves the contrast while preserving structural information, detail information, and average luminance. They are quantified by the high value of contrast improvement index, structural similarity index, and discrete entropy, and low value of average mean brightness error values of the proposed method when compared with the methods available in the literature, including deep learning architectures.