Fast Local Histogram Specification

Local histogram specification (LHS) is a useful technique for image processing. However, LHS faces a critical computational challenge when it is applied to high-resolution high-precision images. The calculation of the values in the cumulative distribution function (CDF) and the mapped value for the central pixel in each sliding window is time consuming with the computational complexity O(s + L) of the state-of-theart techniques, where s is the side length of the square window and L is the number of gray levels. In this paper, we propose a fast algorithm for LHS, called fast local histogram specification (FLHS). FLHS reduces the complexity of calculating the CDF value for the central pixel in each sliding window to O(s + √L), and the time complexity for the mapping procedure in each window to O(log L). This results in the overall time complexity of LHS reduced from O(s+L) to O(s+√L) in each sliding window. Theoretical analysis shows that the newly developed algorithm is efficient. Experimental results on the 8-bit and high-resolution high-precision (16-bit) images demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed algorithm.