A novel optimal fuzzy system for color image enhancement using bacterial foraging

Abstract

A new approach is presented for the enhancement of color images using the fuzzy logic technique. An objective measure called exposure has been defined to provide an estimate of the underexposed and overexposed regions in the image. This measure serves as the dividing line between the underexposed and overexposed regions of the image. The hue, saturation, and intensity (HSV) color space is employed for the process of enhancement, where the hue component is preserved to keep the original color composition intact. A parametric sigmoid function is used for the enhancement of the luminance component of the underexposed image. A power-law operator is used to improve the overexposed region of the image, and the saturation component of HSV is changed through another power-law operator to recover the lost information in the overexposed region. Objective measures like fuzzy contrast and contrast and visual factors are defined to make the operators adaptive to the image characteristics. Entropy and the visual factors are involved in the objective function, which is optimized using the bacterial foraging algorithm to learn the parameters. Gaussian and triangular membership functions (MFs) are chosen for the underexposed and overexposed regions of the image, respectively. Separate MFs and operators for the two regions make the approach universal to all types of contrast degradations. This approach is applicable to a degraded image of mixed type. On comparison, this approach is found to be better than the genetic algorithm (GA)-based and entropy-based approaches. © 2009 IEEE.