Adaptive contrast enhancement using gain-controllable clipped histogram equalization

Histogram equalization is a simple and effective method for contrast enhancement as it can automatically define the intensity transformation function based on statistical characteristics of the image. However, it tends to alter the brightness of the entire image, which it is not suitable for consumer electronic products, where preservation of the original brightness is essential to avoid annoying artifacts. This paper presents a new contrast enhancement method for generalization of the existing bihistogram equalization (BHE) and recursive mean-separate histogram equalization (RMSHE) methods. The proposed method is referred to gain-controllable clipped histogram equalization (GC-CHE) to provide both histogram equalization and brightness preservation. More specifically adaptive contrast enhancement is realized by using clipped histogram equalization with controllable gain. The clipping rate is determined based on the mean brightness, and the clipping threshold is determined based on the clipping rate. The clipping rate is adaptively controlled to enhance the contrast with preserving the mean brightness. It is mathematically proven that the mean brightness of the output image converges to that of the input image with adaptive controlled. Simulation results show that the proposed GC-CHE method outperforms existing histogram-based methods, such as HE, BHE, and RMSHE, in various situations.