Exposure-Based Energy Curve Equalization for Enhancement of Contrast Distorted Images
Kankanala Srinivas, Ashish Kumar Bhandari, Anurag Kumar Singh · IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology · 2019
This paper presents a novel image contrast enhancement technique that uses exposure-based energy curve equalization (ECE) with a plateau limit. In a primary deviation from the current histogram equalization process for contrast enhancement, the proposed approach uses an energy curve for the same. The energy curve is computed based on the modified Hopfield neural network architecture, which contains spatial context information. The calculated energy curve is clipped with a plateau limit computed as the average of the energy curve. The exposure threshold is computed and used to divide the clipped energy curve. The two resulting energy curves are equalized independently, and the final enhanced image is generated by integrating the images achieved by transforming the equalized energy curves. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated on a variety of low contrast images. The subjective and objective evaluations of the proposed method are compared with the various histogram equalization (HE) based methods and other state-of-the-art methods to exemplify the effectiveness.