An efficient technique for image contrast enhancement using artificial bee colony

Contrast enhancement is a significant phase in image processing for improving visual and informational quality of a degraded image. We propose an enhancement technique for poor contrast images which utilizes modified Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) technique. This paper includes following two major contributions. First, Direction Constraints (DC) has been associated with ABC so that artificial bees can move in right direction to obtain better solution and reduce computational time. This is similar to natural bees which use their memory to find out food sources. Second, Contrast based Quality Estimation (CQE) is used as an objective function of ABC. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed technique.