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     Research Journal of Applied Sciences, Engineering and Technology


A Review of Image Contrast Enhancement Methods and Techniques

1G. Maragatham and 2S. Md. Mansoor Roomi
1Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Anna University, University College of Engineering, Ramanathapuram
2Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai, India
Research Journal of Applied Sciences, Engineering and Technology  2015  5:309-326
http://dx.doi.org/10.19026/rjaset.9.1409  |  © The Author(s) 2015
Received: August ‎31, ‎2014  |  Accepted: October ‎29, ‎2014  |  Published: February 15, 2015

Abstract

In this study we aim to provide a survey of existing enhancement techniques with their descriptions and present a detailed analysis of them. Since most of the images while capturing are affected by weather, poor lighting and the acquiring device itself, they suffer from poor contrast. Sufficient Contrast in an image makes an object distinguishable from the other objects and the background. Contrast enhancement improves the quality of images for human observer by expanding the dynamic range of input gray level. A plethora enhancement techniques have though emerged, none of them deem to be a universal one, thus becoming selective in application. In such a scenario, it has become imperative to provide a comprehensive survey of these contrast enhancement techniques used in digital image processing.

Keywords:

Automatic enhancement, histogram equalization, soft computing, spatial domain, stochastic resonance, transform domain,


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Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

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This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

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ISSN (Online):  2040-7467
ISSN (Print):   2040-7459
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