Enhancing Moon Crescent Visibility Using Contrast-Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization and Bilateral Filtering Techniques

Image enhancement is becoming increasingly important with the advancement of space exploration techniques and the technological development of more durable and scientifically sound observatories equipped with more powerful telescopes. The enhancement of images helps astronomers analyze the results and act toward determining the dates of religious festivals. This work describes a technique known as contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) with grayscale contrast enhancement and bilateral filtering. We apply CLAHE on the L component of the CIE-Lab color space to adjust lightness contrast. Subsequently, grayscale contrast enhancement is performed to increase the visibility of the moon crescent. Noise caused by grayscale contrast enhancement is reduced using bilateral filtering. Two quantitative measures are selected (PSNR and MSE) to show the visual improvement achieved by the proposed algorithm.