Medical Image Enhancement Using Modified Color Histogram Equalization

Image enhancement is crucial in medical imaging. Histogram equalization is an image enhancement technique employed to enhance image contrast, which has become a vital part of general and medical image processing. Although it is widely studied and applied, traditional histogram equalization achieves poor image enhancement results because it does not consider hue preservation. This study proposes a novel image enhancement method that incorporates hue preservation to address this problem. The results show that, compared with the equalized image of each RGB color channel using the traditional method, the proposed method yields superior results, with higher accuracy in terms of mean squared error and peak signal-to-noise ratio, when applied to retinal and prostate cancer images. This can effectively assist physicians in making the proper judgment.