Contrast Enhancement Dynamic Histogram Equalization for Medical Image Processing Application

Image processing requires an excellent image contrast-enhancement technique to extract useful information invisible to the human or machine vision. Because of the histogram flattening, the widely used conventional histogram equalization image-enhancing technique suffers from severe brightness changes, rendering it undesirable. Hence, we introduce a contrast-enhancement dynamic histogram-equalization algorithm method that generates better output image by preserving the input mean brightness without introducing the unfavorable side effects of checkerboard effect, artefacts, and washed-out appearance. The first procedure of this technique is; normalizing input histogram and followed by smoothing process. Then, the break point detection process is done to divide the histogram into subhistograms before we can remap the gray level allocation. Lastly, the transformation function of each subhistogram is constructed independently. (C) 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 21, 280-289, 2011; Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI 10.1002/ima.20295