A Novel Contrast Enhancement Technique on Palm Bone Images

Contrast enhancement plays a fundamental role in image processing. Many histogram-based techniques are widely used for contrast enhancement of given images, due to their simple function and effectiveness. However, the conventional histogram equalization (HE) methods result in excessive contrast enhancement, which causes natural looking and satisfactory results for a variety of low contrast images. To solve such problems, a novel multi-histogram equalization technique is proposed to enhance the contrast of the palm bone X-ray radiographs in this paper. For images, the mean-variance analysis method is employed to partition the histogram of the original grey scale image into multiple sub-histograms. These histograms are independently equalized. By using this mean-variance partition method, a proposed multi-histogram equalization technique is employed to achieve the contrast enhancement of the palm bone X-ray radiographs. Experimental results show that the multi-histogram equalization technique achieves a lower average absolute mean brightness error (AMBE) value. The multi-histogram equalization technique simultaneously preserved the mean brightness and enhanced the local contrast of the original image.