Image Enhancement

The aim of Image Enhancement is to obtain new image which “more suitable” than the
original image by improving the image quality. This technique includes smoothing,
sharping, highlighting features, normalizing illumination..etc.
There are two approaches for image enhancement:
1. Image Enhancement in the Spatial Domain: direct manipulation of pixels in the image plane.
2. Image Enhancement in the Frequency Domain: modifying Fourier transform of the image.

1. Image Enhancement in the Spatial Domain

Spatial domain: is the aggregate of pixels composing an image and the procedures that
operate directly on these pixels, denoted by the expression:

Where:
f ( x , y )is the input image, g ( x , y ) is the processed image, T is an operator on f.

The form

where, for simplicity in notation, r and s are variables denoting, respectively, the gray
level of f (x , y )and g ( x , y ) at any point ( x , y ) .

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Enhancement using basic intensity transformation
1. Image Negatives
The negative of an image with gray levels in the range [ 0 , l−1 ]is obtained by using the
negative transformation shown in Figure below, which is given by the expression.
s=l−1−r … … … … .. 3.3

2. Contrast Stretching
Low-contrast images can results from poor illumination, lack of dynamic range in the
imaging sensor, or even the wrong setting of a lens aperture during image acquisition.
Contrast stretching is a process that expands the range of intensity levels in an image so
that it spans the full intensity range of the recoding medium or display device.
Figure below shows a typical transformation used for contrast stretching

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3. Intensity-Level Slicing
Highlighting a specific range of intensities in an image often is of interest. Applications
include enhancing features such as masses of water in satellite imagery and enhancing
flaws in X-ray images. The process, often called intensity-level slicing, can be
implemented in several ways, but most are variations of two basic themes. One approach
is to display in one value (say, white) all the values in the range of interest and in another
(say, black) all other intensities. This transformation shows in figure below (a) produces a
binary image. The second approach based on the transformation in figure below (b),
brightens (or darkens) the desired range of intensities but leaves all other intensity levels
in the image unchanged.

4. Bit- Plane Slicing

Pixels are digital numbers composed of bits, for example, the intensity of each pixel in a
256-level gray-scale image is composed of 8bit (i.e., one byte) instead of highlighting
intensity-level ranges, we could highlight the contribution made to total image
appearance by specific bits.as figure below illustrates, an 8 bit image may be considered
as being composed of eight 1-bit planes, with plane 1 containing the lowest-order bit of
all pixels in the image and plane 8 all the highest-order bits.

Bit-plane representation of an 8-bit image.

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Histogram Processing
The histogram of a digital image with gray levels in the range[ 0 , L−1 ] is a discrete
function:

Where rk is the kth gray level andnk is the number of pixels in the image having gray
level.
It is common practice to normalize a histogram by dividing each of its values by the total
number of pixels in the image, denoted by n. Thus, a normalized histogram is given by:

Loosely speaking p ( rk ), gives an estimate of the probability of occurrence of gray level.

Consider Figure below shown in four basic gray-level characteristics:

1. Dark image that the components of the histogram are concentrated on the low (dark)
side of the gray scale.

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2. Light image that the components of the histogram are concentrated on the high (white)
side of the gray scale.

3. Low contrast low contrast has a histogram that will be narrow and will be centered
toward the middle of the gray scale

4. High contrast high contrast has a histogram that covers a wide range of the intensity
scale

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