Introduction

Image enhancement can generally be classified into

Point or pixel specific operations Radiometric

enhancement
Neighborhood operations Geometric enhancement

Image enhancement is necessary to aid visualisation

and interpretation of images.

Point Operations
Image analysis by photo-interpretation is often facilitated when the radiometric nature of the image is enhanced to improve its visual impact Specific differences in vegetation and soil types, for example, may be brought out by increasing the contrast of an image Enhancement can be represented either as a graph or as a table that expresses the relationship between the old and new brightness values

Scalar and Vector Images

Two particular image types require consideration when treating image enhancement The first could be referred to as a scalar image, in which each pixel has only a single brightness value associated with it- black and white photograph The second type is a vector image, in which each pixel is represented by a vector of brightness values, which might be the blue, green and red components of the pixel in a colour scene or, for a remote sensing multispectral image, may be the various spectral response components for the pixel

The Image Histogram

In a spatially quantized scalar image, the brighteness value of each pixel is also quantized e.g a band of Landsat TM. If each pixel in the image is examined and its brightness value noted, a graph of number of pixels with a given brightness versus brightness value can be constructed This graph is referred to as the histogram of the image It describes the distribution of the pixel values of the image

 The tonal or radiometric quality of an image can be assessed from its histogram The histogram can be viewed as a discrete probability distribution since the relative height of a particular bar, normalised by the total number of pixels in the image segment, indicates the chance of finding a pixel with that particular brightness value somewhere in the image

Linear Contrast Modification

Contrast modification is a mapping of brightness values, in that the brightness value of a particular histogram bar is re-specified more favourably The mapping of brightness values associated with contrast modification can be described as y = f (x)

where x is the old brightness value of a particular bar in the histogram y is the corresponding new brightness value.

 In principle, what we want to do in contrast modification is find the form of f (x) that will implement the desired changes in pixel brightness and thus in the perceived contrast of the image The most common contrast modification operation is that in which the new (y) and old (x) brightness values of the pixels in an image are related in a linear fashion
y = f (x) = ax + b

Saturating Linear Contrast Enhancement

Frequently a better image product is given when linear contrast enhancement is used to give some degree of saturation at the black and white ends of the histogram. A particular region of interest in an image may occupy a restricted brightness value range; saturating linear contrast enhancement is then employed to expand that range to the maximum possible dynamic range of the display device with all other regions being mapped to either black or white

Automatic Contrast Enhancement

Most remote sensing image data is too low in brightness and poor in contrast to give an acceptable image product if displayed directly in raw form. Typically the automatic enhancement procedure is a saturating linear stretch The cut-off and saturation limits Bmin and Bmax are chosen by determining the mean brightness of the raw data and its standard deviation Then making Bmin equal to the mean less three standard deviations and Bmax equal to the mean plus three standard deviations

Logarithmic and Exponential Contrast Enhancement

Logarithmic and exponential mappings of brightness values between original and modified images are useful for enhancing dark and light features respectively It is important that the output values be scaled to lie within the range of the device used to display the product and that the output values be rounded to allowed, discrete values

Piecewise Linear Contrast Modification

The piecewise linear mapping function is a particularly useful and flexible contrast modification procedure Characterized by user define break points as shown in diagram below. It is useful for histogram equalization and histogram matching This is a more general version of the saturating linear contrast stretch where the user is able to determine the break points

Histogram Equalization
Rather than contrast or expand the histogram of an image, it may be necessary to modify the contrast of an image so that its histogram matches a preconceived shape, other than a simple mathematical modification of the original version Histogram equilization is the method of producing a uniform histogram A particular and important modified shape is the uniform histogram in which, each bar has the same height

 Such a histogram has associated with it an image that utilises the available brightness levels equally and thus should give a display in which there is good representation of detail at all brightness values At the end of the modification, the number of pixels represented by the range y to y + y in the modified histogram must be equal to the number of pixels represented in the range x to x+x in the original histogram. Figure below;

Diagrammatic representation of contrast modification by the brightness value mapping function y = f (x)

Question
There are certain anomalies associated with Histogram equalization. Identify these anomalies Explain the steps you will take to address these anomalies.

Principle of Histogram Matching

Read up Principle of Histogram matching Density slicing

Source:
Remote Sensing Digital Image Analysis : An Introduction
4th edition, 2006 John A. Richards & Xiuping Jia Or good any RS text

Geometric EnhancementNeighborhood Operations

In contrast to the point operations used for radiometric enhancement, techniques for geometric enhancement are characterised by operations over neighbourhoods Though the procedures equally determine modified brightness values for an images pixels; however, the new value for a given pixel is derived from the brightnesses of a set of the surrounding pixels

 Geometric enhancements of most interest in remote sensing generally relate to smoothing, edge detection and enhancement, and line detection Enhancement of edges and lines leads to image sharpening Most geometric enhancement procedures can be implemented using either the Fourier transform approach or the image domain procedures

Image Smoothing (Low Pass Filtering)

Images can contain random noise superimposed on the pixel brightness values owing to noise generated in the sensors that acquire the image data
systematic quantisation noise in the signal

digitising electronics noise added to the video signal during transmission

 This will show as a speckled salt and pepper pattern on the image in regions of homogeneity it can be removed by the process of low pass filtering or smoothing though at the expense of some high frequency information such as the edge which are degraded in the process

Median Filtering
Median filtering provides an alternative technique for smoothing in which the edges in an image are maintained is that of median filtering. In this the pixel at the centre of the template is given the median brightness value of all the pixels covered by the template

Edge Detection and Enhancement

Edge enhancement is a particularly simple and effective means for increasing geometric detail in an image. It is performed by first detecting edges and then either adding these back into the original image to increase contrast in the vicinity of an edge, or highlighting edges using saturated (black, white or colour) overlays on borders

MERCI