Color Image Enhancement Using a Multiscale Morphological Approach

Abstract

Color image enhancement has been widely applied in a variety of applications from different scientific areas. On the other hand, mathematical morphology is a theory that deals with describing shapes using sets and, therefore, it provides a number of useful tools for image enhancement. Despite its utility, one of the challenges of this theory, when applied to color images, is to determine an order between the components of the image. Color images are represented by multidimensional data structures, which implies that there is no natural order between their components. In this work we propose an image enhancement method for color images that uses the extension of the multiscale mathematical morphology with different color spaces and ordering methods. The experiments carried out show that the proposed method generates competitive results using different ordering methods in terms of both local and global contrast, as well as the color quality of the image.