LWT-CLAHE Based Color Image Enhancement Technique: An Improved Design

Color image enhancement is one of important process and actually a vital precursory stage to other stages in the field of digital image processing. This is due to the fact that the effectiveness of processes in this stage on the output determines the success of other stages for a quality overall performance. This paper presents a color image enhancement technique using lifting wavelet transform (LWT) and contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) to overcome the issue of noise amplification, over and under-enhancement in exiting enhancement techniques. Test images from Computer Vision Database were used for the proposed technique and the performance was evaluated using PSNR and SSIM. Result obtained shows an average improvement of 56.4% and 20.98% in terms of PSNR and SSIM respectively.