A Combination of Variational Mode Decomposition and Histogram Equalization for Image Enhancement

A new technique for image contrast enhancement is proposed in this paper. The technique is based on the variational mode decomposition (VMD) of image and various histogram equalization approaches. The original image is decomposed into different sub-images or modes using VMD. The histogram equalization approaches such as the conventional histogram equalization, the contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization are applied to the mode1 of the original image. For obtaining the enhanced image, a weighting scheme is introduced to combine the processed mode1 image and the original image. The proposed technique is evaluated using various images including the medical image. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed technique outperforms the existing methods for image enhancement. For medical images, the PSNR and the image quality index values improve by using the proposed technique over various HE approaches.