A

REPORT ON
Image contrast and detail enhancement using
Divide and Conquer strategy

Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering

Submitted by:-
Amitesh Gupta 1504005
Nivedita Singh 1504020
Mekala Pranita 1504061

Under the guidance of:

Dr. Ashish Kumar Bhandari

1
 CERTIFICATE

This is to certify that Amitesh Gupta(1504005), Nivedita

Singh(1504020) and Meekala Pranita(1504061) of National Institute of
Technology Patna have successfully completed the project work titled
“Image contrast and detail enhancement using Divide and Conquer
strategy” in partial fulfillment of requirement for the completion of 7th
semester of Bachelor of Technology course from July 2018 to December
2018.

Dr. Ashish Kumar Bhandari Dr. Gayadhar Pradhan

Assistant Professor Associate Professor & H.O.D

E.C.E E.C.E

NIT Patna NIT Patna

2
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to our supervisor Dr.

Ashish Kumar Bhandari for providing his invaluable guidance,
comments, and suggestions throughout the course of the project.
We would also like to thank our friends for the help, comments and
suggestion they provided.

3
OUTLINE
Contents Page No.
1. Abstract 5
2. Introduction 6
3. Brief Literature Review 7
4. Brief Description of work done 8
5. Output 11
6. Block Diagram 16
7. Conclusion and Future Work 17
8. References 18

4
ABSTRACT
The objective of our project is to increase the image contrast and details of the
input image. In most of the works, the unsharp masking algorithm has been
effective in image contrast and sharpness enhancement. It focuses on using edge-
preserving filters to decompose an image into a base layer and a detail layer, and
processes the two parts respectively. These above unsharp masking algorithms
favor in contrast and sharpness enhancement, but they fail in the tradeoff between
details and naturalness. Histogram equalization has been widely-used for image
contrast enhancement, and it suitably adjusts the histogram of an image into a
desired one. The above mentioned methods are easily implemented but produce
poor performance on image naturalness preservation. This method fails in image
details promotion.

Different from the present approaches, the implemented uses the principle of
subspace decomposition so as to increase the amount of attainable contrast and
detail enhancement. The input image is passed through low pass and high pass
filters to get the subspaces. This method gives due attention to the difference
between image low-frequency and high-frequency components, and even the
different importance of low-frequency and high-frequency components is
effectively exploited for image enhancement.Instead of applying ad hoc
determined strategies the coefficients used in the proposed method are optimized
by the efficient golden section search algorithm. Furthermore, a weighted sum-
based adjustment is adopted to combine these subspaces. The proposed method
obtains better naturalness and details enhancements than other methods. It is
observed that the proposed method always maintains the advantages of image
naturalization and details promotion in different noise levels, and it is reflected that
the proposed method has certain robustness to noise.
5
INTRODUCTION
Image enhancement is the process of adjusting digital images so that the results
are more suitable for display or further image analysis. For example, you can
remove noise, sharpen, or brighten an image, making it easier to identify key
features.

Since the rapid advancement of electronic imaging devices, digital images had
become one of the major medium in information exchange. On the other hand,
images are also widely used in many engineering applications where a passive and
non-contact perception of the working environment is needed. In order to realize
the benefits available from the applications of imaging technology, computer-
based image processing techniques are indispensable assets

Application examples of imaging can be found in many areas. For example, remote
sensing images are captured and analysed for land utilization. In the health and
medical fields, images can be used for illness diagnosis. In industries, images can
be used to monitor machine operation conditions by inspecting the wear particle
characteristics. Images are also attractive candidates in human–computer
interaction processes where user gestures are tracked and interpreted. Furthermore,
in electronic devices, image processing has become a mandatory component of a
high-performance product.
In the context of obtaining a good-quality image for use in these applications, one
of the fundamental requirements is to have an image of high contrast to convey the
scene information as much as possible. At the meantime, for a true representation
of the objects of interest and their environment, the enhancement of detail is of
equal importance.

6
BRIEF LITERATURE
There are a number of possible approaches for the contrast and detail enhancement
of images, which are either aimed at a generic application or designed for a
specific purpose. For instance, colour correction and contrast enhancement were
considered simultaneously to produce a high-quality image. A popular choice of
image enhancement technique is the Retinex-based algorithms. The Retinex theory
assumes that color sensations strongly correlate with reflectance, and the amount
of visible light reaching human eyes depends on the product of reflectance and
illumination. Retinex-based algorithms decompose an image into the illumination
and the reflectance, and simultaneously compute the two components with
different regularization constraints of the illumination. However, the above
mentioned methods based on the Retinex theory easily suffer graying-out of
uniform scenes and poorly perform in unnatural images. The unsharp masking
algorithm has been effective in image contrast and sharpness enhancement. It
focuses on using edge-preserving filters to decompose an image into a base layer
and a detail layer, and processes the two parts respectively. Edge-preserving multi-
scale image decompositions were presented for detail manipulation, and it used an
edge-preserving smoothing operator under weighted least square framework for
multi-scale detail extraction. These above unsharp masking algorithms favor in
contrast and sharpness enhancement, but they fail in the tradeoff between details
and naturalness. Histogram equalization has been widely-used for image contrast
enhancement, and it suitably adjusts the histogram of an image into a desired one.
However, this method fails in image details promotion.

So, a divide-and-conquer strategy for image enhancement using subspace

decomposition is proposed. The observed image is decomposed into several

7
subspaces using linear filters, which exclusively extract either low-frequency or
high frequency information from the entire image. Then, the operation of image
contrast enhancement on each of these subspace images is applied by using the
method of weighted gamma correction. Finally, the final image is reconstructed by
fusing these subspace images with different balancing weights. It is demonstrated
that image high-frequency information can be estimated more accurately under the
proposed framework, which results in a more finely structured enhancement for
better visual quality.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF WORK DONE

Subspace decomposition.

Let hs be a predefined convolutional filter. Convolving I with hs, the s-th subspace
image is derived:

Is =I hs

Four convolution filters are considered based on their simplicity and effectiveness.
For example, using the high frequency filters h3 [ ] and h4 [ ]T , we
obtain the subspace images U3 and U4 that contain the high-frequency components
of U. is the 2D convolution operator, and the superscript notation T is the
transpose operator. Then the corresponding frequency responses of low-frequency
filters are written below:

H1 = 1 -H3 and H2 =1- H4

It is noted that the observed subspace images { Is} can be obtained directly using
the complete filters { hs } to convolve the observed image I respectively.

8
Subspace enhancement

After obtaining the observed subspace image Is by convolving I with the filter hs,
the subspace image Is is enhanced independently. Based on image subspace
decomposition with four filters, this is treated as four separate enhancement
problems for which any enhancement algorithm can be applicable.

The I-signal representing the intensity or brightness is processed in the system. The
I-signal is fed simultaneously into a compressor and an expander, both adopting
the gamma correction approach with the factor γ, giving interim outputs Icp and Iex ,
respectively. An additional interim-enhanced image Ien is derived from the
compressed and expanded images using a weighting factor α. This newly obtained
image is tested for an objective function composed of maximum entropy and a
penalty term depending on the brightness error between the input and the interim-
enhanced image. The governing factors, γ and α are optimized for a highest
objective function. The optimization is carried out using the efficient golden
section search for its implementation simplicity .When an optimal parameter set is
obtained, the interim image is reconverted to RGB from HSI as the output for
display or for further processing.

The contrast-enhanced image is obtained from the weighted sum of the two
interim-compressed and interim-expanded images. That is

Ien = α Icp + (1 − α) Iex, α∈ [0 1]

Where Icp is the compressed image and Iex is the expanded image. The weighting
factor α is adopted to adjust the resultant image mean brightness. The compressed
interim image is obtained from

Icp = I γ γ>1,

9
While the expanded interim image is given by

Iex,= 1 − (1 − I)γ .

The search carried out by the golden section algorithm employed the objective
function, given by

J = H × (1 – δ/ μ(I)) , δ= |μ(Ien) − μ(I)|

Where μ (Ien) is the mean brightness of the interim-enhanced images, μ(I) is the
mean brightness of the input image. If there is no brightness error, the image
entropy H is restored to its original value. On the contrary, when brightness error
exists, the entropy is reduced as a penalty.

Weighted subspace fusion

Once the enhanced subspace images are obtained, we necessarily take both the
difference of subspace images and the different importance of subspace images
into consideration, and effectively reconstruct the final image by the weighted
fusion of these enhanced subspace images. The final solution U can be analytically
computed:

Where ws are the balancing weights differently adopted for different subspace
images enhancement, and these weights have certain universality to be fixed for all
test image.

10
 Output (Image1)

ORIGINAL OUR METHOD

(a) Original Image (b) BHEPL (c) DSIHE

(d) BBHE (e) GAMMA (f) our method

11
 Output (Image2)

ORIGINAL OUR METHOD

(a) Original Image (b) BHEPL (c) DSIHE

(d) BBHE (e) GAMMA (f) our method

12
 Output (Image 3)

ORIGINAL OUR METHOD

(a) Original Image (b) BHEPL (c) DSIHE

(d) BBHE (e) GAMMA (f) our method

13
 Output (Image4)

ORIGINAL OUR METHOD

(a) Original Image (b) BHEPL (c) DSIHE

(d) BBHE (e) GAMMA (f) our method

14
 Output (Image5)

ORIGINAL OUR METHOD

(a) Original Image (b) BHEPL (c) DSIHE

(d) BBHE (e) GAMMA (f) our method 15

 BLOCK DIAGRAM

Input image

Pass through 2 low pass and 2 high

pass filters

Apply enhancement technique on

each subspace

Weighted sum of enhanced subspaces

Output image

16
 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
A divide-and-conquer strategy is proposed for image contrast and details
enhancements. In the proposed framework, we design effective filters to
fulfill image subspace decomposition, employ GDS to enhance each
subspace image for contrast enhancement, and obtain the final image by
fusing enhanced subspace images with different weights for details
generally extended to other enhancement methods, and differently-
designed filters can be easily and effectively used for image
decomposition. Four subspaces enhancement in the proposed framework
needs higher computational costs, however, the parallel computation by
the GPU hardware can be exploited to reduce the computation time of
these subspaces enhancement. These works will be explored in the near
future.

17
 REFERENCES
1. G. Jiang, C.Y. Wong, S.C.F. Lin, M.A. Rahman, T.R. Ren, Ngaiming
Kwok, Haiyan Shi, Ying-Hao Yu & Tonghai Wu (2015) Image
contrast enhancement with brightness preservation using an optimal
gamma correction and weighted sum approach, Journal of Modern
Optics.
2. Image enhancement using divide-and-conquer strategy q Peixian
Zhuang, Xueyang Fu, Yue Huang, Xinghao Ding ⇑ Fujian Key
Laboratory of Sensing and Computing for Smart City, School of
Information Science and Engineering, Xiamen University, China,
3. Google search engine.
4. https://in.mathworks.com/discovery/image-enhancement.html
5. https://in.mathworks.com/help/images/contrast-adjustment.html
6. https://in.mathworks.com/help/images/examples/contrast-
enhancement-techniques.html

18