IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL.
30, 2021
A Context-Based Image Contrast Enhancement
Using Energy Equalization With
Clipping Limit
Kankanala Srinivas , Ashish Kumar Bhandari , and Puli Kishore Kumar
Abstract— In this paper, a new context-based image contrast
enhancement process using energy curve equalization (ECE)
with a clipping limit has been proposed. In a fundamental
anomaly to the existing contrast enhancement practice using
histogram equalization, the projected method uses the energy
curve. The computation of the energy curve utilizes a modified
Hopfield neural network architecture. This process embraces
the image’s spatial adjacency information to the energy curve.
For each intensity level, the energy value is calculated and the
overall energy curve appears to be smoother than the histogram.
A clipping limit applies to evade the over enhancement and
is chosen as the average of the mean and median value. The
clipped energy curve is subdivided into three regions based
on the standard deviation value. Each part of the subdivided
energy curve is equalized individually, and the final enhanced
image is produced by combining transfer functions computed
by the equalization process. The projected scheme’s qualitative
and quantitative efficiency is assessed by comparing it with the
conventional histogram equalization techniques with and without
the clipping limit.
Index Terms— Contrast enhancement, color image, context
modelling, energy curve, image enhancement.
I. I NTRODUCTION
L OW contrast images have a detrimental effect on visual
aesthetics. Contrast enhancement targets eliminating the
problem of highly concentrated contrast in a specific range
and attempts to portray all the image data. Several approaches
are reported in the literature to amend the low contrast
problem. Histogram equalization (HE) [1] based methods are
popular for contrast enhancement. General HE is the adaptive,
straightforward, and effective contrast enhancement method.
The results are not optimum as the enhanced images consist
of artifacts, and the mean brightness of the image is altered.
It results in unnecessary visual deterioration, especially in the
video sequences.
Numerous variants are suggested in the HE process to sur-
mount the general HE’s limitations. Contrast limited adaptive
Manuscript received January 8, 2020; revised January 18, 2021 and
April 7, 2021; accepted May 19, 2021. Date of publication May 31,
2021; date of current version June 4, 2021. The associate editor coordi-
nating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was
Prof. Damon M. Chandler. (Corresponding author: Ashish Kumar Bhandari.)
Kankanala Srinivas and Ashish Kumar Bhandari are with the Depart-
ment of Electronics and Communication Engineering, National Institute of
Technology Patna, Patna 800005, India (e-mail: kankanala.ec16@nitp.ac.in;
bhandari.iiitj@gmail.com).
Puli Kishore Kumar is with the Department of Electronics and Com-
munication Engineering, National Institute of Technology Andhra Pradesh,
Tadepalligudem 534101, India (e-mail: pulikishorek@nitandhra.ac.in).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIP.2021.3083448
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5391
HE (CLAHE) [2] is used to increase the contrast locally.
In order to conserve the mean illumination of the image,
numerous brightness preserving methods are reported in the
literature [3]. The histogram is initially partitioned in bright-
ness preserving methods, and HE applies to the individual
sub-histograms. The histogram is divided into two parts in
brightness-preserving bi-HE (BBHE) [4] with the mean illu-
mination of the input image. Then the HE process is continued
with the separated sub-histograms individually.
In contrast to the BBHE, the median value is utilized
in dualistic sub-image HE (DSIHE) [5] to divide the his-
togram. It results in each sub-histogram having the same
quantity of pixels. Then the HE is employed on the individual
sub-histograms. In continuation of these methods, recursive
mean separate HE (RMSHE) [6] and recursive sub-image HE
(RSIHE) [7] are projected, where four sub-histograms are
generated from the histogram based on the mean and median
values.
These modified versions of HE successfully preserve mean
brightness at the outcome. However, it fails to limit artifacts’
introduction if the image histogram has spikes. The spikes
appear in the histogram due to the smooth regions in the
image, which have many similar intensity values. These spikes
alter the enhancement rate and result in over or under enhance-
ment in some regions. The enhancement rate is limited, and
the effect of spikes is removed in bi-HE with a plateau limit
(BHEPL) [8] with the introduction of a clipping limit. The
histogram is initially bisected with the mean value, and then
individual sub-histograms are clipped with a plateau limit
before carrying the HE process.
In these HE based methods, the intensity values which are
in large numbers dominate the effect of those intensity values,
which are in smaller numbers. The dynamic HE (DHE) [9]
is proposed to eliminate this problem. The histogram sub-
division is based on the histogram’s local minima values
in this approach. The quadrants dynamic HE (QDHE) [10]
approach assigns a new dynamic range to the sub-histograms.
Four sub-histograms are generated based on the median value
and a clipping limit is applied as the mean intensity value.
Then the HE process is carried out on the sub-histograms.
A simple histogram modification scheme (SHMS) [11] alters
the histogram’s boundary values. The brightness preserving
dynamic fuzzy HE (BPDFHE) [12] uses the fuzzy logic
to compute the histogram. The computed fuzzy histogram
is divided into parts based on the local maxima values.
5392
Fig. 1. Illustration of the proposed algorithm.
In median-mean-based sub-image clipped HE (MMSICHE)
[13], initially, a plateau limit is applied, which is equal to the
median value. Then the clipped histogram is bisected based
on the median intensity value. The parted sub-histograms are
split on the basis of individual mean values. Most of the
methods mentioned above utilize the input image histogram
and further processing. In contrast to these methods, a new
way of computation of histogram is proposed in [14], in which
a smoothed 2D-histogram is computed by minimizing the sum
of Frobenius norms in the uniform histogram and the input
histogram.
In [15], the histogram is computed based on the texture
information. Two such methods are reported and named
as dominant orientation-based texture HE (DOTHE) and
enhancement via texture region-based HE (ETHE). A new
method of automatic image contrast enhancement using a
reduced reference quality metric based optimal histogram
mapping (ROHIM) is presented in [16]. A new fuzzy his-
togram modification scheme is presented in fuzzy-contextual
contrast enhancement (FCCE) [17]. In this method, the fuzzy
similarity index is used to alter the histogram. The fuzzy
histogram is premised on the contextual information of the
intensity values. Then HE is applied to the computed fuzzy
histogram. A new image enhancement scheme with the
joint histogram equalization (JHE) is presented in [18]. The
two-dimensional histogram is generated based on the adjacent
pixel relationships.
A. Prior Art
The process of HE enriches the contrast of an image, and
a number of approaches have been recommended to enrich
the method. The contrast enhancement’s primary intent is to
ameliorate images’ visual characteristics by improving the
salient features without altering the picture’s global appearance
(pleasantness). Due to its simplicity and easy implementation,
the HE appears to be the synonym for CE. Different methods
are proposed to amend the general HE’s drawbacks, using
the input histogram. However, the spatial adjacency among
the neighboring pixels is not considered during the histogram
computation.In reality, the pixel intensity values have some
strong correlations among the surrounding pixels. It may affect
the enhancement rate in the equalization process and result in
artifacts such as halo artifacts, over-enhancement, a surge in
the noise level, and level saturation (clipping).
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL. 30, 2021
The image histogram has been the only available method
for contrast enhancement for a long time. Some modifications
are proposed, such as 2D histogram, fuzzy histogram, etc.
The present paper’s key objective is to develop a novel
approach for CE. The proposed approach uses the energy
curve in a primary difference from HE’s current CE practice.
To achieve this, the histogram’s essential features have been
adopted by considering the spatial relationships among the
pixels. The proposed method also alters the pixel values using
transformation function resulting from the probability density
function (PDF) and cumulative density function (CDF) in a
manner similar to the HE process.
B. Contributions
Traditional histogram-based techniques neglect pixel inten-
sity values’ spatial adjacency in an image. The use of an
energy function is applied to obviate this problem. Unlike
HE-based methods, the proposed method utilizes a spatial
context-based energy curve framework for CE. The energy
curve is computed by considering the spatial adjacency infor-
mation at each input image’s intensity value [19], [20]. The
calculated energy curve is analogous to the histogram of the
image and looks smoother than the histogram.
In this paper, the main focus is to generate a transfer
function by equalizing the energy curve in lieu of the his-
togram. A novel approach is presented based on the energy
curve equalization. The energy curve of an image is used first
time for image enhancement application, and it is based on
the modified Hopfield neural network (HNN). The computed
energy curve is spliced into triplets based on the standard
deviation value. The clipping limit is chosen as the median’s
average and the energy curve’s mean value.
The remaining parts of the paper are structured as follows.
In section II, the procedure to compute the energy curve
and equalization process with the clipping limit is presented.
Section III exhibits the results and discussion of the pro-
jected method. Finally, the paper ends with the conclusion
in section IV.
II. E NERGY C URVE E QUALIZATION W ITH C LIPPING L IMIT
The proposed method is depicted graphically in Fig. 1.
It comprises two significant steps: energy curve computation
and transfer function (TF) generation. The computation of
the energy curve and energy curve equalization process is
described in the following subsections.
SRINIVAS et al.: CONTEXT-BASED IMAGE CONTRAST ENHANCEMENT USING ENERGY EQUALIZATION 5393

A. Energy Curve
For an image, the energy curve is derived from the modified
HNN architecture [19], [21]. The HNN architecture comprises
neurons, where each neuron is interconnected to other neurons
by different weights. In this modified HNN model, each
neuron is replaced with the pixel in the image and each pixel
is connected to the nearest neighborhood pixel.
The term modified HNN is used since the synaptic weights
are modified in the neural network architecture. These weights
are fixed as ‘1’ or ‘0’. For the pixels lying in the neighbor-
hood, the synaptic weight is assigned as ‘1’; otherwise, it is Fig. 2. Visual illustration of neighborhood sizes and corresponding normal-
fixed as ‘0’. The network’s full status is represented by the ized energy curves. (a) Original Mandrill image (b) Energy curves.
network architecture’s energy function computed. The energy
curve consists of peaks and valleys similar to the histogram
and is computed by taking the image’s neighborhood pixel
distribution.
The energy curve computation procedure is as follows: Let
E k represent the energy curve for an image of size M × N.
The value gi j represents the intensity level at the position
(i, j ) specified in the span of [0, L − 1]. Here the value of L
represents the extreme gray level. Typically, the intensity value
varies from 0-255 for an 8-bit representation. The energy at a
particular intensity level is gi j computed as

f

M 
N  
M 
N 
Eg = − bi j · b pq + ci j · c pq (1)
i=1 j =1 pq∈N d i=1 j =1 pq∈N d
ij ij

where ‘g’ represents the gray value, the value of ‘ f ’ varies

from 1 to 3 for a color image and fixes as ‘1’ for gray images.
For every gray level, corresponding energy is computed based
on the equation. Thus, the curve consists of different energy
values for different intensity values. For each intensity level,
the matrix Bg is computed, whose entries are calculated as

+1, if bi j > g
Bg = (2)
−1, else
where the bi j represents the pixel intensity value at the pixel
location (i, j ); thus, for each intensity value, the matrix Bg (B0 ,
B1 , B2 . . . , B255 ) is computed, which consists of ‘+1’ or ‘−1’
as entries based on the intensity values in the original image.
Fig. 3. Visual presentation of Bg matrix computation. (a) represents the
In Fig. 3, a sample entry of Bg is presented. As shown structure of Bg matrix (b) represents the sample entry values in Bg matrix.
in Fig. 3, the matrix Bg is also having a size similar to the
input image. The energy for each gray level is extracted from different system orders (3 × 3, 5 × 5, and 7 × 7) are presented
the Bg matrix using Eq. (1). in Fig. 2. It is observed that the minor deviations are reported
Also, in Eq. (1), the additive term is included to make as increasing the neighborhood sizes.
the energy value a non-negative entry. In the additive term, The computed energy curve for an image and the histogram
the entries of ci j are extracted from the matrix C, which are presented in Fig. 4. The energy curve is computed in the
is a unity matrix of size equal to the input image. The same range as that of a histogram. From the energy curve,
computation also includes the spatial correlation among the it can be observed that the spikes in the histogram are missing
adjacent pixels by specifying a neighboring system N of order in the energy curve. It also consists of peaks and valleys
d. It is defined as Ni,d j = {(i + u, j + v), (u, v) ∈ N d } [19]. but looks smoother than the histogram. The energy curve has
In this work second-order adjacent systems are considered i.e., minimum values, where the histogram records zero.
(u, v){(±1, 0), (0, ±1), (1, ±1), (−1, ±1)}.
The eight immediate pixels are covered in the second-order
system. However, increasing the neighborhood size may not B. Clipping and Slicing of the Energy Curve
reflect the larger deviations than the immediate neighbors and The energy curve is clipped to limit the enhancement rate.
increase computation time. The normalized energy curves with The clipping limit is computed as the average of the median

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5394 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL. 30, 2021

where Ê mean is the mean of the clipped energy curve. Based

on the SD value, lower and upper limits are computed to split
the energy curve. The lower ( L̂ low ) and upper ( L̂ high ) limits
are computed as
L̂ low = L̂ 0 + S D (8)
L̂ high = L̂ L−1 + S D (9)
where L̂ L−1 and L̂ 0 are the maximum and minimum intensity
levels of the input image. The energy curve is spliced into
three sub-energy regions using Eq. (8) and Eq. (9). The
first sub-energy curve ranges from 0 to L̂ low , the second
sub-energy curve ranges from L̂ low + 1 to L̂ high , and the
third sub-energy curve ranges from L̂ high + 1 to L − 1.
The standard deviation is chosen as the splicing parameter
to cover the image’s maximum energy region. The middle
sub-energy curve conceals the maximum energy region, which
helps conserve the image’s mean energy. The computed energy
curves, along with the clipping limits and lower and upper
bounds for the sub-division of energy curves, are presented
in Fig. 4(c).

C. Energy Curve Equalization

In this process, generated sub-energy curves are equalized
independently and combined to generate the final transfer
function. The computation of the transfer function is similar
to the HE process. It involves three steps: computation of
PDF, calculation of CDF from the PDF, and transfer function
generation.
The PDF for sub-energy curves is P D FL (l), P D FM (l), and
P D FU (l) and are defined as
P D FL (l) = Ê(l)/n L for 0 ≤ l ≤ L̂ low (10)
P D FM (l) = Ê(l)/n M for L̂ low + 1 ≤ l ≤ L̂ high (11)
Fig. 4. Results for a sample image (a) Input image (b) Enhanced image P D FU (l) = Ê(l)/n U for L̂ high + 1 ≤ l ≤ L − 1 (12)
(c) Input energy curve and equalization process (d) Input histogram (e) Output
histogram (f) Mapping function and (f) Output energy curve. where n L , n M , and nU are the absolute energy level value in
the three sub-energy curves, respectively. The CDF for each
sub-energy curve is computed as
and mean intensity value of the energy curve and computed

l
as C D FL (l) = P D FL (k) f or 0 ≤ l ≤ L̂ low (13)
Cmedian = medi an(E(l)) (3) k=0

Cmean = mean(E(l)) (4) 

l
C D FM (l) = P D FM (k) f or L̂ low + 1 ≤ l ≤ L̂ high
Cclip = (Cmedian + Cmean )/2 (5)
k= L̂ low +1
The energy curve is clipped using the clip limit computed (14)
in Eq. (5). It can be given as 
l
 C D FU (l) = P D FU (k) f or L̂ high + 1 ≤ l ≤ L − 1
Cclip , if E(l) ≥ Cclip
Ê(l) = (6) k= L̂ high +1
E(l) else
(15)
where Ê(l) is the clipped energy curve. The energy curve is From the CDFs, the transfer function for each sub energy
partitioned into three regions based on standard deviation (SD) curve is generated as
and computed as
 TL = L̂ low × C D FL (16)
  L−1

l=0 (l − Ê mean ) × E(l)
2
SD =  TM = ( L̂ low + 1) + ( L̂ high − L̂ low + 1) × C D FM (17)
 L−1 (7)
l=0 E(l) TU = ( L̂ high + 1) + (L − L̂ high + 1) × C D FU (18)

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SRINIVAS et al.: CONTEXT-BASED IMAGE CONTRAST ENHANCEMENT USING ENERGY EQUALIZATION
Fig. 5. Visual representation of input and enhanced images for aero-plane named as Img1 (CEED2016 [23] ). Top row from left to right specifies the
input image, images with HE [1], CLAHE [2], BPDFHE [12], and MMSICHE [13]. Bottom row from left to right specifies the images with DOTHE [15],
ROHIM [16], FCCE [17], JHE [18] and proposed ECE.
The final transfer function is generated by combining the
three functions as
T = TL + TM + TU
A contrast-enhanced image is formulated by applying the
above transfer function to the input image.
The proposed method remaps the pixel distribution like
the HE process using the transformation function derived
from Eq. (19). The input intensity values’ distribution to the
output intensity values is based on the transformation function.
It may be visualized as a lookup table, where every intensity
value in the input image is remapped to the output intensity
value in the enhanced image. The computed transformation
function for a single image is presented in Fig. 4(f). The same
thing was also carried out in the HE and the proposed method.
The main difference is that, instead of using the histogram,
a newly proposed energy curve is utilized to generate the
transformation function.
III. R ESULTS AND D ISCUSSION
In this section, various experiments are conducted to demon-
strate the proposed algorithm. The experiments are engaged
with images of different illumination conditions with signifi-
cant contrast variations. Since this is the first time the energy
curve is utilized for image enhancement, the performance is
compared with the other histogram-based algorithms. Hence
the comparison is justified.
Those histogram-based algorithms’ performance is already
verified for image contrast enhancement problems. Quantita-
tive and qualitative analysis is performed to prove that the
projected method outperforms other state-of-art methods.
A. Qualitative Assessment
The proposed procedure has been applied to several images
from the Berkeley [22], CEED2016 [23] standard databases.
The assessment using visual perception is the best way to
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5395
judge an image enhancement algorithm’s quality. Since some-
times, quality degraded images may also result in good metric
scores. Out of many, few images are presented in Figs. 5 to 10
(19)
for visual comparison. The input image and enhanced image
with corresponding histograms and energy curves are shown
in Fig. 3. From Fig. 4, it may be noted that the proposed
method enhances the image while preserving the natural char-
acteristics of the image. Further, it is evident from Fig. 2 (d)
and Fig. 2 (e) that the proposed method does not alter the
histogram’s original shape. It is also easy to observe that the
shape of the energy curve between the original and enhanced
image is preserved while trying to distribute the energy all
over the image.
The results obtained after enhancement with the pro-
posed method have been compared with popular HE based
methods. These methods includes the HE [1], CLAHE [2],
BPDFHE [12], MMSICHE [13], DOTHE [15], ROHIM [16],
FCCE [17], and JHE [18]. The visual comparison is presented
in Figs. 5-10. In Fig. 5, the enhanced results are presented for
the aero-plane image from the CEED2016 dataset with the
identification mark as Img1. The input image has a smooth
background region, whereas the compared methods produce
artifacts in the enhanced images. The same artifacts can be
observed in Fig. 5. In case of the proposed method, it produces
an optimum level of enhancement without introducing any
artifacts.
Fig. 6 represents the input and enhanced duck image images
from the CEED2016 dataset with the identification mark
as Img2. The image can be easily separated into the fore-
ground and background regions where the foreground region
represents the object. In most of the compared algorithms,
an improper enhancement is reported in either the foreground
or background. Whereas the proposed method enhances the
foreground and background regions properly, and the enhanced
outcome is free from artifacts. Five more images from the
CEED2016 dataset and corresponding outputs are presented
for visual assessment in Fig. 7.
5396
Fig. 6. Visual representation of input and enhanced images for Duck named as Img2 (CEED2016 [23]). Top row from left to right specifies the input image,
images with HE [1], CLAHE [2], BPDFHE [12], and MMSICHE [13]. Bottom row from left to right specifies the images with DOTHE [15], ROHIM [16],
FCCE [17], JHE [18] and proposed ECE.
Fig. 7. Input and enhanced images of the proposed method from the
CEED2016 [23] dataset. Top row represents the input images and bottom
row indicate the corresponding enhanced images.
The enhanced results are presented for the bird image
in Fig. 8. Except for the proposed ECE method, the other
method’s output images destroy the image’s visual appearance
as it introduces a different type of visual artifacts. The pro-
posed method enhances the image without introducing any
artifacts. Contrast enhancement operation introduces several
artifacts in the enhanced images, especially in images with
a smooth background. Any contrast enhancement algorithm’s
performance should be tested over the images with a smooth
background.
In Fig. 9, the enhanced images are presented for Img4.
Fig. 9 shows that the proposed method enhances the image
with almost no artifacts introduced into the output image.
Further, in Fig. 10, the enhanced results are presented for
thirteen different images. The input images are presented
in Fig. 10 (a). Fig. 10 (b) presents images obtained after
enhancement using the HE method. It may be noted that
that the enhanced images are corrupted with artifacts as it
overstretches the smoothed regions of the image. CLAHE
performs better than HE but still fails to remove the artifacts,
as shown in Fig. 10 (c). Fig. 10 (d) shows that BPDFHE
maintains a good contrast but fails to restore the original
color information and loses the natural appearance of the
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image. The enhanced results of the MMSICHE (Fig. 10 (e))
show that this method produces the contrast-enhanced images
but cannot wholly eliminate artifacts. It may be seen from
Fig. 10 (f) that the methods DOTHE over-enhance the color
level in images, resulting in a poor visual quality of images
enhanced. The enhanced results of ROHIM are presented
in Fig. 10 (g). It enhances the images; however, it suffers
from color saturation issues in some cases. The enhanced
results of FCCE are presented in Fig. 10 (h). It is observed
that the FCCE results in over-enhancement and introduces
unnatural colors. The enhanced results of JHE are presented
in Fig. 10 (i). This method produces visually unpleasing
images. The enhanced results are not optimum compared to
the proposed method. The enhanced results with the proposed
algorithm are presented in Fig. 10 (j). It may be seen that the
enhanced images are free from artifacts in almost all cases and
that the images have been optimally enhanced with preserved
naturalness.
B. Quantitative Assessment
Human visual perception is used to judge the image
enhancement quality. Visual information or image quality
accuracy is closely related to how humans perceive distor-
tion that may vary from human to human. The contrast
enhancement operation may also introduce artifacts and cause
side effects. Thus, in support of the qualitative assessment,
a quantitative assessment is also essential. Therefore, image
quality assessment using some quality measures has long
been available. A good contrast enhancement algorithm should
obtain an adequate enhancement level with minimum dis-
tortions. In order to justify both enhancement and quality
preservation, the following quality metrics are used in the
comparison.
Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) [24],
Feature Similarity Index Measure (FSIM) [25], Measure
of Enhancement (EME) [26], Gradient Magnitude Similarity
SRINIVAS et al.: CONTEXT-BASED IMAGE CONTRAST ENHANCEMENT USING ENERGY EQUALIZATION 5397

Fig. 8. Visual representation of input and enhanced images for bird named as Img3 (43074 from BSDS [22]). Top row from left to right specifies the
input image, images with HE [1], CLAHE [2], BPDFHE [12], and MMSICHE [13]. Bottom row from left to right specifies the images with DOTHE [15],
ROHIM [16], FCCE [17], JHE [18] and proposed ECE.

Fig. 9. Visual representation of input and enhanced images for bird1 named as Img4 (8049 from BSDS [22]). Top row from left to right specifies the
input image, images with HE [1], CLAHE [2], BPDFHE [12], and MMSICHE [13]. Bottom row from left to right specifies the images with DOTHE [15],
ROHIM [16], FCCE [17], JHE [18] and proposed ECE.

Deviation (GMSD) [27], Visual Saliency Induced Index
(VSI) [28], Michelson-Law measure of enhancement
(AME) [26], a second-derivative-like measure of enhancement
(SDME) [29] and patch-based contrast quality index
(PCQI) [30] have been used for quantitative comparison. Out
of these metrics, EME, AME and SDME are no-reference
metrics used to measure the enhancement, whereas the
remaining metrics are used to measure the quality of the
enhanced image. It may be noted that, for the parameters
except GMSD and EME, higher values for parameter scores
indicate better enhancement. It may also be noted from [26]
that sometimes a noisy image may also produce the highest
EME value. The closest value of enhanced image EME to
the input image EME indicates better enhancement [31].
A lower value of GMSD indicates better performance of the
enhancement algorithm.
Table I represents the quantitative comparison for the SSIM
metric for different images used in the visual evaluation. The
parametric scores for the FSIM and VSI metrics are presented
in Table II and Table III, respectively. The proposed method’s
metric score is superior to the comparative methods and has
the highest value in almost all SSIM, FSIM and VSI metrics
cases.
The EME values of the enhanced images for different
algorithms, including the input images, are shown in Table V.
From the table, it can be concluded that the proposed method
produces higher values of EME than the input images for
all cases. Also, the value of EME of the proposed method
differs from the lowest amount from the input image com-
pared with other methods. Compared with the other methods,
the proposed method’s GMSD metric performance is shown
in Table VI.
From the table, it is clear that the proposed method produces
the lowest scores for GMSD compared to other methods in
most cases. The higher score for the AME metric designates
a better contrast enhancement. The computed scores of the
AME metric are shown in Table VII. From the table, it can
be easily observed that the proposed method is achieving the
best metric score in almost all cases.
A higher value of the SDME metric indicates better
enhancement. The computed scores of the SDME metric for
different methods are shown in Table VIII, the proposed
method achieving the best score in most cases. In Table VIII,
the PCQI metric score for fifteen different images is presented
for different algorithms. The best metric score is highlighted
with a bold case value in each case.

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5398 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL. 30, 2021

Fig. 10. Visual comparison of input and enhanced images. From left to right indicates the Input image, HE [1], CLAHE [2], BPDFHE [12], and MMSICHE [13],
DOTHE [15], ROHIM [16], FCCE [17], JHE [18], and Proposed ECE with clipping limit.

An algorithm’s performance cannot be justified by evalu- The proposed algorithm is justified over a wide range of
ating a small set of images. Due to the images’ stochastic images; five hundred images are considered from the Berkeley
discrepancy, the algorithm may fail in one or more cases. BSDS [22] dataset, and 30 images from the CEED2016 [23]

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SRINIVAS et al.: CONTEXT-BASED IMAGE CONTRAST ENHANCEMENT USING ENERGY EQUALIZATION 5399

TABLE I TABLE IV
SSIM VALUES FOR THE D IFFERENT M ETHODS EME VALUES FOR THE D IFFERENT M ETHODS

TABLE II TABLE V
FSIM VALUES FOR THE D IFFERENT M ETHODS GMSD VALUES FOR THE D IFFERENT M ETHODS

TABLE III TABLE VI

VSI VALUES FOR THE D IFFERENT M ETHODS AME VALUES FOR THE D IFFERENT M ETHODS

are used in evaluating the performance. The average scores are
presented in Table IX and Table X, respectively, for the BSDS
and CEED2016 [23] datasets. The computed average metrics
scores indicate that; the proposed algorithm achieves the best
metric score in most cases. This exhaustive experimentation
proves the proposed method’s supremacy over the other
histogram-based methods. The statistical boxplots are pre-
sented in Fig. 11 for the comparisons’ metrics.
The qualitative and quantitative analysis proves the strength
of the proposed algorithm. It yields optimum contrast

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5400
Fig. 11. Box plots for different metrics over the BSDS [22] dataset over 500 images.
TABLE VII
SDME VALUES FOR THE D IFFERENT M ETHODS
TABLE VIII
PCQI VALUES FOR THE D IFFERENT M ETHODS
enhancement with the preserved natural characteristics of the
image. In almost all cases, the enhanced images are free
from artifacts. It may be concluded from the results that the
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON IMAGE PROCESSING, VOL. 30, 2021
TABLE IX
AVERAGE M ETRIC VALUES OF 500 I MAGES F ROM BSDS
D ATASET FOR D IFFERENT M ETHODS
TABLE X
AVERAGE M ETRIC VALUES OF M ETRICS FOR CEED
D ATASET FOR D IFFERENT M ETHODS
proposed method outperforms most of the conventional and
state-of-the-art histogram-based methods for image contrast
enhancement.
IV. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, a new energy curve based image contrast
enhancement method has been introduced. The energy curve
includes the spatial relationships among the surrounding pix-
els. The computed energy curve is clipped with a plateau
limit. The clipping limit is chosen as the average of the
energy curve’s median and mean intensity values. The clipped
histogram is divided into three parts based on the median
value. Each parted sub-energy is equalized independently and
combined to form the final enhanced image. The proposed
SRINIVAS et al.: CONTEXT-BASED IMAGE CONTRAST ENHANCEMENT USING ENERGY EQUALIZATION
method enhances the images while preserving the natural char-
acteristics and produces an optimum enhancement with almost
no artifacts. The qualitative and quantitative assessment proves
the proposed algorithm’s robustness for various standard color
images.
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Kankanala Srinivas received the B.Tech. and
M.Tech. degrees in electronics and communication
engineering from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological
University Hyderabad, India. He is currently pursu-
ing the Ph.D. degree in electronics engineering with
the National Institute of Technology, Patna, India.
His research interests include image enhancement
and image segmentation.
Ashish Kumar Bhandari received the B.Tech.
degree in electronics and communication engineer-
ing from Mahatma Jyotiba Phule Rohilkhand Uni-
versity, Bareilly, India, in 2009, and the M.Tech. and
Ph.D. degrees (Gold Medalist) from the Indian
Institute of Information Technology Jabalpur, India,
in 2011 and 2015, respectively. He is cur-
rently an Assistant Professor with the Department
of Electronics and Communication Engineering,
National Institute of Technology Patna, India. His
research interests include image processing and soft
computing.
Puli Kishore Kumar received the B.Tech. degree in
electronics and communication engineering and the
M.Tech. degree in communication and radar systems
from Acharya Nagarjuna University, Guntur, and the
Ph.D. degree from the National Institute of Tech-
nology (NIT), Warangal. He is currently working
as an Assistant Professor with the Department of
Electronics and Communication Engineering (ECE),
National Institute of Technology, Andhra Pradesh,
India.