A Two-Level Hybrid Image Fusion Technique for Color Image Contrast Enhancement

A simple and effective approach for color image contrast enhancement is proposed in this paper. The proposed approach effectively combines linear and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) based fusion methods for contrast enhancement. In the proposed approach, we first derive three different enhanced images using three dominant existing techniques. Next, two of the enhanced images are combined using the linear fusion method. The image resulting from linear fusion is then combined with the third image through DWT-based fusion technique to obtain the final enhanced image. Since two-levels of fusion using two different techniques are employed, therefore, the proposed approach is referred to as two-level hybrid image fusion technique. Since three different images are employed to obtain the final enhanced image, there are 3 possible ways in which two-level hybrid image fusion can be performed. All the possible combinations of two-level hybrid image fusion are compared with the existing techniques qualitatively as well as quantitatively in this paper. The proposed approach is noted to be better than the existing image enhancement methods.