Color enhancement of multispectral images for effective visualization

Abstract

The color enhancement of multispectral images is a useful tool to visualize their spectral features. Previously, a color enhancement method which enhances the feature of specified spectral band without changing the average color distribution was proposed. However, the enhanced feature is sometimes unapparent or invisible, when the wavelength range of the specified band is visually insignificant. In this paper, we propose a modified method for more effective visualization capability in the color enhancement for multispectral images. In the proposed method, a user specifies both the spectral band for extracting the spectral feature and the color to be visualized, respectively. Then, the spectral feature in the multispectral image is enhanced by arbitrary color. The proposed method of the color enhancement was experimentally applied to multispectral images, such as a human skin image and microscopic images of pathological tissue specimen. As a result, we verified that the proposed method can effectively visualize the spectral features.