Detecting of contrast over-enhancement

Over-enhancement is the major problem of image contrast enhancement algorithms which could induce the loss of edges, change the important texture, impair the fine details, and make the images look unnatural. Over-enhancement has traditionally been assessed by visual inspection due to the fact that there is no an effective objective criterion for over-enhancement yet. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for the detection of over-enhancement. The main contributions of the paper are as follows. (1) The reasons for generating over-enhancement are investigated and analyzed deeply. (2) An objective criterion for detecting over-enhancement is proposed. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can locate the over enhanced areas accurately and effectively, and provide a quantitative criterion to assess the over-enhancement levels well. The proposed approach will be useful for dynamically monitoring the quality of the enhanced image, and optimizing the parameter settings of the contrast enhancement algorithms.