A Weighting Mean-Separated Sub-Histogram Equalization for Contrast Enhancement

In the last decade, improvement of the visual image quality has been actively developed using the contrast enhancement techniques due to the need to better show the visual information contained within the image for all vision-based systems. Histogram equalization is the most commonly used contrast enhancement method. However, the conventional histogram equalization methods usually result in excessive contrast enhancement, which causes the unnatural look and visual artifacts of the processed image. In this paper, we propose a novel histogram equalization method using the precise histogram separation along with the piecewise transformed function. The contrast enhancement results of the proposed method were not only analyzed through qualitative visual inspection and for quantitative accuracy, but are also compared to the results of other state-of-the-art methods.