Effectiveness of contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization technique on multispectral satellite imagery

Abstract

Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization technique (CLAHE) is a widely used form of contrast enhancement, used predominantly in enhancing medical imagery like X-rays and to enhance features in ordinary photographs. This paper aimed to understand the effectiveness of using this technique in multispectral satellite imagery and to study its effectiveness in different regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. This study also aimed at analyzing variations of spatial and spectral resolutions of a sensor affect the performance of the CLAHE technique by means of comparing quantitative parameters of the enhanced images between the sensors. A general idea of the feature that can be enhanced in each spectral region was also studied. The results showed that a comparative study between the CLAHE technique and the conventional global histogram equalization technique resulted in the former technique emerging superior of the two and thereby reconstructed images of better quality. © 2017 Association for Computing Machinery.