An Appropriate Histogram Equalization Technique for Thermal Image Enhancement of Neck Region

The pattern of heat distribution in the human body is a natural and early indicator of anomalies. A noninvasive screening method for determining body temperature distribution is thermal imaging. The distribution of an object's thermal radiation can be seen in thermal images. However, the infrared images typically have little contrast. As a result, it is important to increase the contrast of IR images before they are recognized and analyzed. In this research, more effective approaches for increasing the quality of infrared thermal images are presented. This study investigates different Histogram Equalization techniques - Adaptive Histogram Equalization, Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization and Adaptive double plateaus histogram equalization to improve the gray scale contrast of the thermal Image. For our experiment, we have used 12 thermal images of the thyroid for AHE, CLAHE and ADPHE processing. After preprocessing and post processing of IR images, statistical parameters are derived. Processing on thermal images used in this work suggest the best HE approach which generates greater contrast-enhancement results for thermal images with extra information.