Contrast enhancement with brightness preservation of low light images using a blending of CLAHE and BPDHE histogram equalization methods

Insufficient illumination usually degrades the visual appearance of an image, this, in turn, results in an unnatural look, washed-out effects, and unwanted artifacts. Image enhancement has proven to be one of the most important applications in the fields of agriculture, medical, military, etc. Regarding this, histogram equalization (HE) techniques are generally utilized to enhance image quality. These methods are simple and very effective, however, in some instances, they failed to preserve brightness and natural form like the original scene leading to the need for improvement. To overwhelm this limitation linear weighted fusion of “Contrast limited adaptive HE (CLAHE)” with color restoration technique and “Brightness preserving dynamic HE (BPDHE)” is done. The performance assessment of proposed technique is explored with 1200 images of Exdark dataset. The objective evaluations of the projected method are then compared with the histogram equalization (HE) derived methods to exemplify the effectiveness. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Bharati Vidyapeeth's Institute of Computer Applications and Management.