Adaptive contrast enhancement based on histogram modification framework

An adaptive contrast enhancement method is proposed in this paper. The proposed method is based on the contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) and the histogram modification framework. The predefined clip point for the clipped histogram of each block in original CLAHE may still result in excessive contrast enhancement in homogeneous regions, which gives the enhanced image an unnatural look and creates visual artifacts. By replacing the clipped histogram with a modified histogram, the proposed method achieves success in adaptively enhancing contrast in each block based on its content. In addition to this, a novel mapping function is introduced to further improve the enhanced result of histogram equalization (HE). Experiments are conducted with both visible images and infrared images to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The results show that the proposed method gets better performance on contrast enhancement and visual quality of the enhanced results.