Gray-level grouping (GLG): An automatic method for optimized image contrast enhancement - Part II: The variations

This is Part II of the paper, "Gray-Level Grouping (GLG): an Automatic Method for Optimized Image Contrast Enhancement". Part I of this paper introduced a new automatic contrast enhancement technique: gray-level grouping (GLG). GLG is a general and powerful technique, which can be conveniently applied to a broad variety of low-contrast images and outperforms conventional contrast enhancement techniques. However, the basic GLG method still has limitations and cannot enhance certain classes of low-contrast images well, e.g., images with a noisy background. The basic GLG also cannot fulfill certain special application purposes, e.g., enhancing only part of an image which corresponds to a certain segment of the image histogram. In order to break through these limitations, this paper introduces an extension of the basic GLG algorithm, selective gray-level grouping (SGLG), which groups the histogram components in different segments of the grayscale using different criteria and, hence, is able to enhance different parts of the histogram to various extents. This paper also introduces two new preprocessing methods to eliminate background noise in noisy low-contrast images so that such images can be properly enhanced by the (S)GLG technique. The extension of (S)GLG to color images is also discussed in this paper. SGLG and its variations extend the capability of the basic GLG to a larger variety of low-contrast images, and can fulfill special application requirements. SGLG and its variations not only produce results superior to conventional contrast enhancement techniques, but are also fully automatic under most circumstances, and are applicable to a broad variety of images.