contrast enhancement

Image enhancement (4) : Contrast enhancement

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Contrast enhancement is applied to images where there is a lack of “contrast”. Lack of contrast manifests itself as a dull or lacklustre appearance, and can often be identified in image histograms.  Improving contrast, and making an image more visually (or aesthetically) appealing is incredibly challenging. This is in part because the result of contrast enhancement truly is a very subjective thing. This is even more relevant with colour images, as modifications to a colour, can impact different people differently. What ideal colour green should trees be? Here is a brief example grayscale image and its intensity histogram.

A picture of Reykjavik from a vintage postcard

It is clear from the histogram that the intensity values do not span the entire range of values, effectively reducing the contrast in the image. Some parts of the image that could be brighter, are dull, and other parts of the image that could be darker, are lightened. Stretching both ends of the histogram out, effectively improves the contrast in the image.

The picture enhanced by stretching the histogram, and improving the contrast

This is the simplest way of enhancing the contrast of an image, although the level of contrast enhancement applied is always guided by the visual perception of the person performing the enhancement.

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The perception of enhanced colour images

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Image processing becomes more difficult when you involve colour images. That’s primarily because there is more data involved. With monochrome images, there is really only intensity. With colour images comes chromaticity – and the possibility of modifying the intrinsic colours within an image whilst performing some form of image enhancement. Often, image enhancement in colour images is challenging because the impact of the enhancement is very subjective.

Consider this image of Schynige Platte in Switzerland. It is very colourful, and seems quite vibrant.

The sky however seems too aquamarine. The whole picture seems like some sort of “antique photo filter” has been applied to it. How do we enhance it, and what do we want to enhance? Do we want to make the colours more vibrant? Do we want to improve the contrast?

In the first instance, we merely stretch the histogram to reduce the gray tonality of the image. Everything becomes much brighter, and there is a slight improvement in contrast. There are parts of the image that do seem too yellow, but it is hard to know whether this is an artifact of the original scene, or the photograph (likely an artifact of dispersing yellow flower petals).

Alternatively, we can improve the images contrast. In this case, this is achieved by applying a Retinex filter to the image, and then taking the average of the filter result and the original image. The resulting image is not as “bright”, but shows more contrast, especially in the meadows.

Are either of these enhanced images better? The answer of course is in the eye of the beholder. All three images have certain qualities which are appealing. At the end of the day, improving the aesthetic appeal of a colour image is not an easy task, and there is no “best” algorithm.