What Is Image Enhancement?

Image enhancement is the process of adjusting digital images so that the results are more suitable for display or further image analysis. For example, you can remove noise, sharpen, or brighten an image, making it easier to identify key features.

Here are some useful examples and methods of image enhancement:

• Filtering with morphological operators
• Histogram equalization
• Denoising
• Linear contrast adjustment
• Median filtering
• Unsharp mask filtering
• Contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE)
• Decorrelation stretch

The following images illustrate a few of these examples:

Image enhancement algorithms include deblurring, filtering, and contrast methods. For more information, see Image Processing Toolbox™.

See also: Steve on Image Processing (blog), image segmentation, digital image processing, image transform, image analysis, geometric transformations and image registration, image processing and computer vision, feature extraction, optical flow, color profile, image analysis, image thresholding, edge detection, image registration, affine transformation, point cloud, 3D image processing, denoising