Optimal Contrast Enhancement with Linear Image Fusion and Patch-Based Contrast Quality Index

This paper presents an optimal contrast enhancement method to improve the visual quality of low contrast images. Two parts are involved in the proposed method: linear image fusion and patch-based contrast quality index. The linear image fusion combines the input image and its histogram equalized image with a weighting factor. The weight is then optimized by the patch-based contrast quality index. The proposed method is justified by four examples and compared with two contrast enhancement methods based on histogram equalization. The results show that our method is superior to the comparison methods and gives promising enhanced images.