Cuckoo search with search strategies and proper objective function for brightness preserving image enhancement

Image enhancement can be formulated as an optimization problem where one parameterized transformation function is used for enhancement purpose. The proper enhancement significantly depends on two factors- fine tuning of the parameters of the corresponding parameterized transformation function and other one is the selection of a proper objective function. In this study a parameterized variant of histogram equalization (HE) has been used for enhancement purpose and to tune the parameters of that variant a modified cuckoo search (CS) with new global and local search strategies is employed. This paper also concentrates on the selection of a proper objective function to preserve the original brightness of the image. A new objective function has been developed by combining fractal dimension (FD) and quality index based on local variance (QILV). Visual analysis and experimental results prove that modified CS with search strategies outperforms the traditional and some other existing modified CS algorithms. Considering the image’s brightness preserving capability, the proposed objective function significantly outperforms other existing objective functions. © 2017, Pleiades Publishing, Ltd.