Image contrast and color enhancement using adaptive gamma correction and histogram equalization

Image contrast and color preservations are essential needs for color vision and the processing of digital color images. Histogram Equalization (HE) is mostly used for enhancing the digital images. However, HE results in over-enhancement and intensity saturation effect in most cases. In this paper, an effective image contrast enhancement method called an Adaptive Gamma Correction with Weighted Histogram Distribution (AGCWHD) method is proposed to improve contrast while preserving natural color and richer details in images. In the proposed method, the new adaptive gamma correction method is implemented to enhance the contrast, while a weighted histogram distribution is employed for natural color and detail preservation. Experiments are conducted and tested on 500 TID 2008 benchmark images to evaluate the performance of proposed method. Experiment results show that the proposed technique performs well for a wide variety of low-quality images, and achieves better or comparable objective and subjective comparisons with the state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed technique produced extremely high-quality images compared with the state-of-the-art existing techniques.