Modified self — Adaptive Plateau Histogram Equalization with mean threshold for brightness preserving and contrast enhancement

Abstract

Histogram Equalization (HE) is a simple, effective and widely used contrast enhancement technique as it can automatically define the intensity transformation function based on statistical characteristics of the image, but it tends to change the mean brightness of the image to the middle level of the gray level range. HE also produces saturation effects by extremely pushing the intensities towards the right or the left side of the histogram. To surmount these drawbacks, Clipping or Plateau Histogram Equalization techniques for brightness preserving and contrast enhancement have been proposed, but, these are not suitable for automatic systems because of manual selection of threshold level. Self-Adaptive Plateau Histogram Equalization (SAPHE) selects the threshold level automatically, but the process is relatively complicated and sometimes fails in execution. To overcome these drawbacks, a Modified Self - Adaptive Plateau Histogram Equalization with Mean threshold (Modified SAPHE-M) is proposed in this paper and compared the experimental results with Histogram Equalization (HE), Self-Adaptive Plateau Histogram Equalization (SAPHE) and Modified Self-Adaptive Plateau Histogram Equalization (Modified SAPHE) by using image quality measures such as Absolute Mean Brightness Error (AMBE) and Peak-Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR).