Multichannel image contrast enhancement based on linguistic rule-based intensificators

This study follows the direct approach to image contrast enhancement, which changes the image contrast at each its pixel and is more effective than the indirect approach that deals with image histograms. However, there are only few studies following the direct approach because, by its nature, it is very complex. Additionally, it is difficult to develop an effective method since it is required to keep a balance in maintaining local and global image features while changing the contrast at each individual pixel. Moreover, raw images obtained from many sources randomly influenced by many external factors can be considered as fuzzy uncertain data. In this context, we propose a novel method to apply and immediately handle expert fuzzy linguistic knowledge of image contrast enhancement to simulate human capability in using natural language. The formalism developed in the study is based on hedge algebras considered as a theory, which can immediately handle linguistic words of variables. This allows the proposed method to produce an image contrast intensificator from a given expert linguistic rule base. A technique to preserve global as well as local image features is proposed based on a fuzzy clustering method, which is applied for the first time in this field to reveal region image features of raw images. The projections of the obtained clusters on each channel are suitably aggregated to produce a new channel image considered as input of the pixelwise defined operators proposed in this study. Many experiments are performed to demonstrate the effect of the proposed method versus the counterparts considered. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.