Color Image Contrast Enhancement Through Hybrid PCA-Linear Image Fusion

Abstract

A simplistic and an efficient approach toward color image contrast enhancement is proposed in this paper. The proposed approach effectively combines linear and principal component analysis (PCA) based fusion methods for contrast enhancement. In the proposed technique, we first obtain three different enhanced images using three pre-existing established techniques. Next, two of the enhanced images are combined using the PCA-based fusion method. The image resulting from first level of fusion is then combined with the third image using linear fusion technique to secure the final enhanced image. Since two different fusion techniques are employed, therefore, the proposed method is referred to as hybrid image fusion technique. Again, as we are employing three different images to secure the final enhanced image, there are 3 possible ways in which hybrid image fusion can be implemented. All the possible combinations of hybrid image fusion are compared with the existing techniques qualitatively as well as quantitatively in this paper. The proposed approach is observed to be better than the contemporary image enhancement methods.