A critical look to some contrast enhancement evaluation measures

Contrast enhancement is one of the most studied problems in image processing. A plethora of approaches has been proposed in the literature for image enhancement since the pioneer work of Kovasznay and Joseph in 1955 [1] and the famous contribution of Gabor in 1965 on image deblurring [2]. However, very few works have been dedicated to contrast enhancement evaluation. This is mainly due to the fact that image enhancement is primarily related to subjective aspects of human perceptual vision. The intent of this paper is to provide a first critical review to some contrast enhancement evaluation measures and propose a new one. An objective comparison of these measures on various color real images processed by some neighborhood based methods is provided. This work is considered as a first step towards the development of a unifying framework for image enhancement evaluation. This could be also used to control the side effect that may result from any image enhancement such as contrast enhancement, denoising, tone mapping and other similar image processing tools.