Robust Intensity-Pair Distribution for Image Contrast Enhancement

Intensity-pair distribution was recently proposed to enhance the contrast of a digital image without noise amplification. In this technique a set of expansion forces are generated to increase the contrast of the image while another set of so called anti-expansion forces are produced to eliminate the noise. The expansion and anti-expansion forces are generated applying a threshold to the local differences between the current pixel and its neighbors. Selection of the threshold is a very sensitive part of this algorithm and could influence the quality of the processed image. In this paper we introduce a novel robust approach based on the intensity-pair distribution in which the drawbacks of the original method are addressed. We present experimental results, performed on color images, to show the performance of our proposed method compared with other existing approaches.