A fast and efficient color image enhancement method based on fuzzy-logic and histogram

A new fuzzy logic and histogram based algorithm for enhancing low contrast color images has been proposed here. The method is computationally fast compared to conventional and other advanced enhancement techniques. It is based on two important parameters M and K, where M is the average intensity value of the image, calculated from the histogram and K is the contrast intensification parameter. The given RGB image is converted into HSV color space to preserve the chromatic information contained in the original image. To enhance the image, only the V component is stretched under the control of the parameters M and K. The proposed method has been compared with conventional contrast enhancement techniques as well as with advanced algorithms. All the above techniques were based on the principle of transforming the skewed histogram of the original image into a uniform histogram. The performance of the different contrast enhancement algorithms are evaluated based on the visual quality, Tenengrad, CII and the computational time. The inter comparison of different techniques was carried out on different low contrast color images. Based on the performance analysis, we advocate that our proposed Fuzzy Logic method is well suited for contrast enhancement of low contrast color images. (C) 2013 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.