Performance Analysis of Graph theory-based Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization for Image Enhancement

Abstract

Nowadays, image enhancement has become a major area of research because of the development of applications that are based on vision.Several digital image processing systems employ such image enhancement strategies with the help of graph theory. As the visibility level in low contrast image features is very less,several image enhancement strategies have been introduced with spatial transformations to enhance image qualityfor improved visualization. Nowadays, image processing plays an important role in the analysis of a patient’s health status and has become extremely popular in medical areas for a wide range of clinical assessments. Generally, medical images contain several complex areas and thereby,few pre-processing approaches are applied to reduce the challenges that occur during different phases of the CAD system. Furthermore, because of external noise interferences, poor illuminating settings as well as other imaging device limitations, the clinical diagnosis becomes a challenging process and medical images do not provide important information for precise categorization. Medical images are available in a variety of applications such as computed tomography, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), mammography, chest X-ray (CXR), and many more. Only the pixel intensity variations between different areas as well as object boundary information are essential for categorization and must be enhanced simultaneously. As a result, the rate of classification in medical images and intensity are increased so that every object during the analysis can be easily identified. The main goal of any image enhancement process is to enhance the quality of the image by reducing noise and on other hand by using three different algorithms such as Luminance Modulation (LM), Gradient Modulation (GM), and Dynamic Histogram Equalization (DHE). These three algorithms are designed with the help of graph theory for effective preservation of edges, losses, and efficient smoothing and to preserve the basic information without any modifications. Image restoration is also referred to as image enhancement and it is concerned with the precise assessment of real images. Generally, the degradation process is not included in many of the image-enhancement approaches that are already existing. Furthermore, with the application of enhancement techniques, the degradation process for medical images results in some significant performance loss. Several techniques have been proposed and the technique which is examined in this research is image enhancement that is based on histogram which mainly concentrates on equalizing the histogram of values. Histogram Equalization (HE) possesses a few basic properties such as altering spatial patterns as well as intensity which in turn results in significant challenges in medical imaging. As a result,Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) is proposed in this work as a feasible approach for medical image analysis to address the problem. The suggested research work demonstrates that the intensity limiting image enhancement with histogram equalization detects the irregularities in dense mammograms with enhanced quality.