Spatial Entropy-Based Global and Local Image Contrast Enhancement

This paper proposes a novel algorithm, which enhances the contrast of an input image using spatial information of pixels. The algorithm introduces a new method to compute the spatial entropy of pixels using spatial distribution of pixel gray levels. Different than the conventional methods, this algorithm considers the distribution of spatial locations of gray levels of an image instead of gray-level distribution or joint statistics computed from the gray levels of an image. For each gray level, the corresponding spatial distribution is computed using a histogram of spatial locations of all pixels with the same gray level. Entropy measures are calculated from the spatial distributions of gray levels of an image to create a distribution function, which is further mapped to a uniform distribution function to achieve the final contrast enhancement. The method achieves contrast improvement in the case of low-contrast images; however, it does not alter the image if the image´s contrast is high enough. Thus, it always produces visually pleasing results without distortions. Furthermore, this method is combined with transform domain coefficient weighting to achieve both local and global contrast enhancement at the same time. The level of the local contrast enhancement can be controlled. Several experiments on effects of contrast enhancement are performed. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithms produce better or comparable enhanced images than several state-of-the-art algorithms.