Bilateral Histogram Equalization for Contrast Enhancement

As image enhancement is a well discussed issue, various methods have already been proposed till to date. Some of these methods perform well for specific applications but most of the techniques suffer from artifacts due to the over or under enhancement. To mitigate this problem a new technique namely Bilateral Histogram Equalization for contrast enhancement (BHE) which uses Harmonic mean of the image to divide the histogram is introduced. BHE is evaluated in both qualitative and quantitative manner and the results show that BHE creates less artifacts on several standard images than other existing state-of-the-art image enhancement techniques.