Contrast Enhancement of MRI Images using Histogram Equalization Techniques

Abstract

MRI images provide a new pathway in the medical field for clinical analysis and diagnose process. As MRI images suffers from contrast degradations, these contrast degradations in MRI images can be solved by application of image contrast enhancement techniques making it more suitable for medical applications. The main objective of image enhancement is to obtain a high quality image after improving the characteristics of the input image. Contrast enhancement techniques are used in images to enhance the visibility quality of internal human body texture in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images. In this paper we have applied the Histogram Equalization (HE), Adaptive Histogram Equalization (AHE) and Contrast-Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) in order to improve the contrast of MRI medical images. Experimental results have shown good efficiency to improve the contrast of MRI medical images with very high quality. Comparison of various image quality measures like MSE, PSNR and SNR are taken into account for evaluation the quality of enhanced MRI medical images.