Contourlet Transform and Histogram Equalization for Brightness Enhancement of Color Image

For decades, several image enhancement techniques have been proposed. Although most techniques require profuse amount of advance and critical steps, the result for the perceive image are not as satisfied, In this paper a new approach for enhancing brightness of color image based on contourlet transform and histogram equalization proposes. The color image is converted to HSI (hue, saturation, intensity) values. The i, which represent the luminance value of color image, decomposed to its coefficients by non-sampling contourlet transform, then applying grey-level contrast enhancement technique on some of the coefficients. Then, inverse contourlet transform is performed to reconstruct the enhanced S compoment. The S component is enhanced by histogram equalization while the H component does not change to avoid degradation color balance between the HSI components. Finally the enhanced S and I together with H are converted back to its original color system. The new approach gives Brightness enhancement more than 20% when was applied on different type of images and tested the performance.