• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.1233-1243
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• 2015

The contrast enhancement is great challenge in the image processing when images are suffering from poor contrast problem. Therefore, in order to overcome this problem an automatic method is proposed for contrast enhancement of natural color images. The proposed method consist of two stages: in first stage lightness component in YIQ color space is normalized by sigmoid function after the adaptive histogram equalization is applied on Y component and in second stage automatic color contrast enhancement algorithm is applied on output of the first stage. The proposed algorithm is tested on different NASA color images, hyperspectral color images and other types of natural color images. The performance of proposed algorithm is evaluated and compared with the other existing contrast enhancement algorithms in terms of colorfulness metric and color enhancement factor. The higher values of colorfulness metric and color enhancement factor imply that the visual quality of the enhanced image is good. Simulation results demonstrate that proposed algorithm provides higher values of colorfulness metric and color enhancement factor as compared to other existing contrast enhancement algorithms. The proposed algorithm also provides better visual enhancement results as compared with the other existing contrast enhancement algorithms.

• Journal of Korea Society of Digital Industry and Information Management
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.193-198
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• 2010

In this paper, an efficient contrast enhancement algorithm using histogram stretching is proposed. Histogram equalization (HE) and histogram stretching (HS) are effective techniques for contrast enhancement. However, HE and HS result often in excessive contrast enhancement. Proposed technique not only produces better results than those of conventional contrast enhancement techniques, but is also adaptively adjusted to image contents.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers D
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• v.53 no.2
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• pp.76-85
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• 2004

In this paper, the contrast enhancement method of thermal image is proposed and it is the plateau equalization algorithm using local histogram for the real time display of infrared imagery. Through hardware implementing, its practicality and adequacy are proved. Examinations are executed to verify the effect of contrast enhancement by bright control and contrast control automatic to the plateau value in the manual mode, and that verified the effect of contrast enhancement in the automatic mode and the practicality in the real system. According to the experiment results, the proposed "the application of local histogram and plateau equalization algorithm for contrast enhancement of real time thermal image"in this dissertation is the verified method for the thermal imaging contrast enhancement.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2007.07a
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• pp.357-358
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• 2007

Contrast enhancement in the field of ultrasound imaging contributes to improve the accuracy of medical diagnosis by enhancing the visibility of ultrasound images. This paper proposes a contrast enhancement method that improves the contrast of ultrasound images both globally and locally by fusing global and adaptive contrast enhancement methods. Experimental results show that our approach yields more competitive results than the existing global and adaptive contrast enhancement methods in enhancing the visibility of ultrasound images.

• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.3 no.6
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• pp.358-365
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• 2014

This paper proposes a method that reduces the flickering effect caused by A-GLG (Adaptive Gray-Level Grouping) during video contrast enhancement. Of the GLG series, A-GLG shows the best contrast enhancement performance. The GLG series is based on histogram grouping. Histogram grouping is calculated differently between the continuous frames with a similar histogram and causes a subtle change in the transformation function. This is the reason for flickering effect when the video contrast is enhanced by A-GLG. To reduce the flickering effect caused by A-GLG, the proposed method calculates a modified transformation function. The modified transformation function is calculated using a previous and current transformation function applied with a weight separately. The proposed method was compared with A-GLG for flickering effect reduction and video contrast enhancement. Through the experimental results, the proposed method showed not only a reduced flickering effect, but also video contrast enhancement.

• International Journal of Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Systems
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.35-44
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• 2015

The main purpose of image enhancement is to improve certain characteristics of an image to improve its visual quality. This paper proposes a method for image contrast enhancement that can be applied to both medical and natural images. The proposed algorithm is designed to achieve contrast enhancement while also preserving the local image details. To achieve this, the proposed method combines local image contrast preserving dynamic range compression and contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE). Global gain parameters for contrast enhancement are inadequate for preserving local image details. Therefore, in the proposed method, in order to preserve local image details, local contrast enhancement at any pixel position is performed based on the corresponding local gain parameter, which is calculated according to the current pixel neighborhood edge density. Different image quality measures are used for evaluating the performance of the proposed method. Experimental results show that the proposed method provides more information about the image details, which can help facilitate further image analysis.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.39 no.1
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• pp.76-86
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• 2017

In this study, we propose an automatic contrast enhancement method based on transfer function modification (TFM) by histogram equalization. Previous histogram-based global contrast enhancement techniques employ histogram modification, whereas we propose a direct TFM technique that considers the mean brightness of an image during contrast enhancement. The mean point shifting method using a transfer function is proposed to preserve the mean brightness of an image. In addition, the linearization of transfer function technique, which has a histogram flattening effect, is designed to reduce visual artifacts. An attenuation factor is automatically determined using the maximum value of the probability density function in an image to control its rate of contrast. A new quantitative measurement method called sparsity of a histogram is proposed to obtain a better objective comparison relative to previous global contrast enhancement methods. According to our experimental results, we demonstrated the performance of our proposed method based on generalized measures and the newly proposed measurement.

• 전자공학회논문지 IE
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• v.47 no.3
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• pp.7-13
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• 2010

In this paper, an efficient contrast enhancement algorithm using weighted histogram modification is proposed. For contrast enhancement, histogram equalization (HE) and histogram stretching (HS) are effective techniques. However, HE and HS may have excessive contrast enhancement. Proposed method using weighted histogram modification produces better natural and enhanced results than those of conventional contrast enhancement methods without artifacts.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.15 no.12
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• pp.1409-1416
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• 2012

An image segmentation result depends on pre-processing steps such as contrast enhancement, edge detection, and smooth filtering etc. Especially medical images are low contrast and contain some noises. Therefore, the contrast enhancement and noise removal techniques are required in the pre-processing. In this study, we present an extension by a novel histogram equalization in which both local and global contrast is enhanced using neighborhood metrics. When checking neighborhood information, filters can simultaneously improve image quality. Most important is that original image information can be used for both global brightness preserving and local contrast enhancement, and image quality improvement filtering. Our experiments confirmed that the proposed method is more effective than other similar techniques reported previously.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.53 no.9
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• pp.110-117
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• 2016

Applying the contrast enhancement algorithms to luminance values of color images is a widely used approach to enhance the contrast of color images. The results obtained by this approach have reduced saturation compared with that of the original images in spite of contrast enhancement without color degradation. Applying the contrast enhancement algorithm to each channel of color images is another approach for the contrast enhancement of color images. This method produces improved images in terms of contrast and saturation while the hue of original images is changed. In this paper, main cause of color degradation is analyzed and then solving the problem based on the analysis. The channel adaptive contrast enhancement method considering characteristics of each channel is also proposed to deal with color degradation. As a result, the proposed method enhances the contrast and saturation simultaneously without color degradation. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the conventional methods not only on subjective evaluation but on objective criteria.