2014

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International Conference on Signal Processing and Integrated Networks (SPIN)

Gray-level Image Enhancement Using Differential

Evolution Optimization Algorithm
P. P. Sarangi

B. S. P. Mishra

B. Majhi

S. Dehuri

Department of CSE
Seemanta Engg. College
ppsarangi@gmail.com

Department of CSE
KIIT, Bhubaneswar
mishra.bsp@gmail.com

Department of CSE
NIT, Rourkela
bmajhi@nitrkl.ac.in

Department of ICT
FM University,Balasore
satchi.lapa@gmail.com

than original image by maximizing the measure of entropy.

The work done in this paper proposes an automatic image
enhancement method which determine the parameter values
of the transformation function automatically and objective
evaluation is produced on the enhanced image which determine
the effectiveness of the method.

AbstractDifferential Evolution (DE) algorithm represent an

adaptive search process for solving engineering and machine
learning optimization problems. This paper presents an attempt
to demonstrate its adaptability and effectiveness for searching
global optimal solutions to enhance the contrast and detail in
a gray scale image. In this paper contrast enhancement of an
image is performed by gray level modication using parameterized intensity transformation function that is considered as an
objective function. The task of DE is to adapt the parameters
of the transformation function by maximizing the objective
tness criterion. Experimental results are compared with other
enhancement techniques, viz. histogram equalization, contrast
stretching and particle swarm optimization (PSO) based image
enhancement techniques.

Recent years many evolutionary algorithms have been

applied to image enhancement by several authors. In [5], the
authors introduced a global contrast enhancement technique
using genetic programming (GP) to adopt the color map in the
image so as to t the demands of human interpreter. In [1], a
real-coded GA is used with a subjective evolution criterion
to globally adapt the gray-level intensity transformation in
the image. In [3], a real-coded GA is used with intensity
transformation function to local and global enhancement of
the image. Similarly in [2], [4], a particle swarm optimization
(PSO) algorithms used with intensity transformation function
to local and global enhancement of the image.

KeywordsDifferential evolution, image enhancement, histogram equalization, contrast stretching, particle swarm optimization

I.

I NTRODUCTION

In this paper we have proposed gray-level image contrast

enhancement by DE. Like GA, DE is an evolutionary optimization algorithms produce better result than GA in many
applications. The results obtained by DE are compared with
other automatic image contrast enhancement techniques and
found better in many cases. Both objective and subjective
evaluations are obtained on the output images which reveal
our DE-based method outperforms others for a set of input
images.

The objective of image enhancement is to improve the

quality of an image for subsequent analysis or for image
display. Image enhancement refers to accentuation or sharpening, of an image features such as counters, boundaries,
edges or contrast in order to facilitate further analysis and
display [8]. It is characterized as low level process includes
noise reduction, contrast enhancement, and image sharpening
operations to produce good quality image. Image enhancement techniques can be classied into two broad categories
as spatial domain methods and frequency domain methods.
Spatial domain image enhancement methods can be divided
into four main categories: point operations, spatial operations,
transformation operations, and pseudocoloring [8].

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section

2 describes transformation function and evaluation of tness;
Section 3 presents the theory of DE and proposed DE-based
method; Section 3 gives experimental results obtained in comparison to histogram equalization and PSO-based techniques,
and Section 4 draws the conclusions of our work in this paper.

The evaluation process of the quality of an image is

subjective, needs human judgment. To dene this process
objective it is essential to dene an objective function which
will provide a quantitative measure for enhancement quality.
Automatic image enhancement is a method that produces
enhanced images without human intervention. Majority of the
image enhancement methods select a transformation function
or mapping function to enhance contrast by gray-level modication of the output image in spatial domain. In this work,
contrast enhancement operation is based on spatial operation.

II.

Image enhancement is considered as pre-processing task

for contrast enhancement, which insures subsequent higher
level operations of computer vision such as image analysis
and recognition. The most commonly used image enhancement
technique is histogram equalization. In general, gray levels are
converted linearly for contrast enhancement. However, contrast
of pixels is not enhanced when distribution of the pixels are
near to the minimum gray level and the maximum gray level
in the image. In this situation, histogram equalization can

As image enhancement is an optimization problem that

optimizes parameters of the transformation function in order to achieve an enhanced image by increasing tness. In
the sequel, enhanced image contains maximum information
,(((
978-1-4799-2866-8/14/$31.00
2014 IEEE

FUNCTIONS USED FOR AUTOMATIC

CONTRAST ENHANCEMENT

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2014 International Conference on Signal Processing and Integrated Networks (SPIN)

of m and depend on the intensity value of the pixels in the

neighborhood of (x, y). M is the global mean of the input
image.

produce an image with uniformly distributed gray levels over

the entire gray scale. As a result of this operation unveils
the maximum information contained in the image globally.
In addition to that, enhanced output image maximizes the
entropy for uniform distributions. But a global enhancement
method uses transformation function to modify the pixels gray
levels based on the gray-level distribution over the entire image
that often does not produce satisfying results [15].In order to
obtain good contrast enhancement appropriate relation between
input gray levels and output gray levels must be dened by
considering local and global knowledge of the image [7].
Again, the modication of gray levels of the output image must
be changed dynamically to produce good contrast enhancement
outputs for various gray scale images. In the proposed evolutionary method for automatic contrast enhancement considered
all the shortcomings of classical global enhancement methods
likes a) it include local enhancement technique, b) dynamically
change the gray levels of the unknown image by adapting
parameters in the transformation function, c) user interaction is
not essential during execution of the algorithm. Let us consider
the case of contrast enhancement by gray-level modication in
spatial domain. Here an appropriate transformation function
is used to generate a new intensity value for each pixel of
the original image to produce an enhanced output image. The
transformation function can be expressed as:
g(x, y) = T [f (x, y)]

B. Proposed enhancement method

The proposed enhancement method is derived from (2) and
is applied to each pixel of the input image using the following
transformation [1]:
k.M
[f (x, y) c.m(x, y)] + m(x, y)a (4)
g(x, y) =
(x, y) + b
In equation (4) a, b, c, and k are the parameters dened
as real positive numbers and these values are same for the
whole image. Comparing equation (2) and (4), it is shown
that if the values of the parameters b = 0, c = 1, k = 1and the
last term m(x, y)a is absent, then both equations same. The eq.
(2) has extended the value of the transformation output range
by modifying the local enhancement method as shown in eq.
(4). Four parameters are introduced in transformation function
namely a, b, c, and k to improve the brightness and contrast of
the processed image. The task of the DE is to evolve the best
combination of these four parameters according to an objective
criterion that describes the contrast of the image.
C. Enhancement criterion and tness function

(1)

In order to achieve an automatic image enhancement technique and no objective parameters adjustment by the human
intervention, a criterion to evaluate the quality of the enhanced
image should be chosen. This criterion is considered as tness
function of the DE. To describe the criterion, it is required to
mention that the enhanced image has more number of edgels
and also it has high intensity of edges [6]. But these two are not
sufcient to describe the tness function for a good enhanced
image. Another one measure has been added i.e. entropy value
of the image. Entropy value indicates the average information
content in the image. For enhanced image the histogram of the
gray-levels are uniformly distributed that increase the entropy
of the image. These three measures together describe the
following objective criterion and in this study it is used as
tness function to be maximized.
nedgels(IS )
(5)
.H(Ie )
F (Ie ) = log(log(E(IS )))
M xN
In the eq. (5), Ie is the enhanced image of the original image
produced by the transformation function mentioned in eq.
(4).The edges or edgels can be detected by using many efcient
edge detector algorithms. In this paper Sobel edge detector [15]
is used as automatic threshold detector [Rosin]. Other edge
detector algorithms such as Laplacian [15] and Canny [16]
can be used to nd edges or edgels of the enhanced image.
The sobel edge operator produce an output image Is from the
input enhanced image Ie as:

(6)
Is (i, j) = hIe2 + vIe2

where f(x, y) is the intensity value of the xth column and yth
row coordinate pixel of the input image and g(x, y) is the
modied intensity value of the same coordinate pixel of the
processed output image. T (.) is an operator on f, dened over
some neighborhood N of (x, y). For N we use mostly a square
sub image that is centered at (x, y). The histogram equalization
is a point processing technique, in which transformation of
one pixel depends on the histogram of the overall image.
Overall enhancement performance is good in this method but
sometimes local enhancement of the region is preferred. In
local enhancement, modication of a pixel based on graylevel distribution among its N sub images centered at that
pixel [11]. One of the examples of local enhancement method
is Adaptive histogram equalization (AHE) which works efciently on medical images [14]. However, AHE is a very
time consuming approach. Our approach used in this paper
for local enhancement is less time consuming method similar
to statistical scaling presented in [13].
A. Local enhancement method
Local enhancement method uses transformation function
that based on the gray-level distribution in the neighborhood
window of size (n x n) centered at each pixel in the input
image. The transformation function [11] applied to each pixel
at coordinates (x, y) using following equation
g(x, y) = A(x, y).[f (x, y) m(x, y)]
with
A(x, y) =

M
with0 < k < 1
(x, y)

(2)

hIe (i, j) = gIe (i + 1, j 1) + 2gIe (i + 1, j) + gIe (i + 1, j +

1) + gIe (i 1, j 1) 2gIe (i 1, j) gIe (i 1, j + 1) and
vIe (i, j) = gIe (i 1, j + 1) + 2gIe (i, j + 1) + gIe (i + 1, j +
1) + gIe (i 1, j 1) 2gIe (i, j 1) gIe (i + 1, j 1)

(3)

In equation (2) and (3), m(x, y) the local mean and (x, y)
local standard deviation are computed in an n x n neighborhood
centered at (x, y) pixel of the input image. Thus, the values

E(Is ) is the sum of M x N pixel intensity of sobel edge

image Is . nedgels is the number of pixels, whose intensity value
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2014 International Conference on Signal Processing and Integrated Networks (SPIN)

difference equation (xr2,G xr3,G ). In order to increase the

diversity of the donor vectors, crossover operator is used. The
crossover operator produces a trial vector ui,G , by mixing the
target vector and the donor vector.

uji,G , if (randj CR)or(j = jrand )
uji,G =
(9)
xji,G , if (randj > CR)or(j = jrand )

is above a threshold in the sobel edge image. The entropy of

the enhanced image Ie is calculated as follows:
H(Ie ) =

255


ei

(7)

i=0

where ei = hi log2 (hi ) if hi = 0, otherwise ei = 0and hi is

the probability of occurrence of ith intensity value of enhanced
image.

where j = 1, 2, , D; randj [0, 1] and in jrand rand

1, 2, , D; CR is the crossover constant takes values in the range
[0, 1]. DE selection operation is a greedy selection, if the
tness value of the individual trail vector is greater than the
individual target vector, then new target vector will be the trail
vector for the next generation. Otherwise the previous target
vector will be retained to the next generation.

III. IMAGE ENHANCEMENT USING

DIFFERENTIAL EVOLUTION ALGORITHM
The proposed algorithm is used to search an optimal
combination of a, b, c, and k parameters value out of enormous
combinations for increasing the contrast-levels of the enhanced
image. The DE uses eq.(6) as the tness function to yield best
solution that has maximum tness value. To nd best solution,
DE evolves candidate solutions generation wise using eq. (4)
and eq. (5). The good enhanced image contains: 1) increase the
number of edgels in the image; 2) increase the overall intensity
of the edges; and c) increase entropy measure in the image.

B. Proposed methodology based image enhancement

The transformation function dened in eq. (4) contains
both global and local information to determine a good contrast image. However, the gray-levels of the enhanced image
are changed dynamically using four parameters like a, b, c,
and k has been incorporated in the transformation function.
The appropriate values of these four parameters dene a
relation between input gray-levels and output gray-levels. In
the proposed algorithm, an optimal set of values for these
four parameters are determined using differential evolution
algorithm. A population of size NP number of vectors, each
with four parameters is randomly initialized values within their
range. Then each individual xi target vector of the population
generates an enhanced image. The quality of the enhanced
image is calculated using an objective function dened in eq.
(5), which is termed as tness value of the individual target
vector. The best solution is determined based on the maximum
tness value achieved so far over all generations. When the
process is terminated the enhanced image is created by the
optimum parameters value of the best solution, which has
the maximum tness value and the enhanced image is the
output of the proposed algorithm. The proposed methodology
is described in Fig.(1)

A. Differential evolution algorithm

In order to overcome the GAs limitation, Storn and Price
[9] proposed Differential Evolution (DE) a new evolutionary
algorithm, which is a simple and yet powerful evolutionary
algorithm for real parameter optimization problems. DE has
demonstrated good convergence properties and outperforms
others well known evolution algorithms. In the last few years,
the DE algorithm has been successfully applied to many image
processing applications. DE creates new candidate solutions
by combining the parent individual and several other individuals of the same population. DE possesses genetic operators,
referred to as mutation, crossover and selection. The role of
the genetic operators is to ensure selection pressure to obtain
even better solutions from good ones (exploitation) and to
cover entire solution space to maximize the probability of
discovering the global optimum solution (exploration). Like
other evolutionary algorithms, DE initializes with a population
of constant size of NP individual candidate solutions, where
NP is the population size. Each member is a D-dimensional
real-parameters vector representing a point in the solution
space S.

C. Comparison between PSO and DE

In all population-based optimization algorithms possess
two intrinsic characteristics such as exploration and exploitation. The ability of the algorithm to explore entire search space
is called exploration whereas the ability to converge to the best
solution near a good solution is called exploitation.

The population of DE consists of NP D dimensional parameters target vectorsXi,G = [X1,i,G , X2,i,G , ......XD,i,G ],i =
1, 2, ....., N P for each generation G. The parameters of each
vectors of the population are randomly select values, which
U
uniformly distributed on the intervals [xL
j , xj ].Then the tness
value of each individual target vector is calculated through
evolution. DE uses random parent selection regardless of their
tness values. In every generation, each individual xi,G gets a
chance to become parent and depends on the other randomly
select auxiliary parents. Three auxiliary parents xr1,G , xr2,G ,
and xr3,G are selected randomly such that r1, r2, r3
{1, 2, ..., N P } and i = r1 = r2 = r3. Then new vector xi,G
is called donor vector can be derived as follows:
vi,G = xr1,G + F (xr2,G xr3,G )

In PSO, the exploration ability has been achieved by pbest

and the exploitation ability has been achieved by gbest. However, PSO does not have evolution operator like crossover and
mutation operators in GA but particles explore the search space
with the velocity by sharing information among themselves.
Then all the particles in the population tend to converge faster
to the best solution but more often it may converge to local
best solution. Therefore, the performance of PSO depends on
initial parameter values. The performance of PSO is also very
much dependent on setting of control parameters values.
Like GA, DE has crossover and mutation operators. The
main difference GA and DE is the mutation scheme that
makes DE algorithm self-adaptive. In addition, because of
this mutation scheme of DE, nding global solution is certain

(8)

where F is the scaling factor, a positive real-valued parameter

chosen from [0, 2],which controls the amplication of the
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2014 International Conference on Signal Processing and Integrated Networks (SPIN)

Set NP, F, and CR parameters of the DE

Set Gmax and gen = 1
Initialize a population of size NP of D dimensional target
vectors
Evaluate tness values of each individual vector of the
population using eq. (5)
Set best = best solution with maximum tness value
while gen Gmax do do
for each target vector xi i =1 to NP do do
Generate enhanced image using eq. (4) for xi
Evaluate tness value using eq. (5) for xi
if Fitness(xi )>Fitness(best) then
best = xi
end if
Randomly select index of three different
individuals such that r1 = r2 = r3 = i
The mutation operation produces donor vector
vi = xr1 + F.(xr2 xr3 )
The crossover operation produces trail vector ui
using target xi and donor vi vectors
for each parameter j = 1 to D do do
if rand CR then uij = vij then
uij = vij
else
uij = xij
end if
end for
The selection operation produces new target
vector xi as follows
if Fitness(ui ) > Fitness(xi ) then
xi = ui
else
old target vector xi will be retained as
parent for next generation
end if
end for
gen = gen + 1
end while
Fig. 1.

by counting the number of edgels as detected automatically

using the Sobel edge detector. Table 3 gives more objective
information by counting number of edgels for all input images.
A. Experimental Setting
In DE algorithm, the parameters are the population size NP,
scaling factor F, and crossover constant CR. These parameters
affect the result and convergence speed of the algorithm. The
larger population size insures efcient searching by covering
entire search space. But larger population size increases lot
of computation and execution time of the algorithm also.
Population size for all input images are shown in table 1.
In general, scaling factor F, varies in the range of [0, 2],
in this work adaptive scaling factor has been used. During
initial stages of search process start with large value, Fmax to
explore large diverse area of the search space and later stages
it is gradually deceases to minimum value, Fmin to exploit
the optimal solution in the seach space. To meet this objective
we reduce the value of the scale factor linearly w.r.t time from
predened maximum to minimum values in the range of 1.9
to 0.4. Scale factor, F is calculated as follows:
M AXIT iter
)
(10)
M AXIT
The lager value of crossover CR ensures to speed up the
convergence. The CR value can be within [0, 1] range, here it
is taken 0.5.
Fiter = (Fmax Fmin )(

In the proposed method, four parameters namely a, b, c,

and k are used in the eq. (4). The range of these parameters is same as [3]. The parameters value are in the range
a [0, 1.5],b [0, 0.5], c [0, 1]and k [0.5, 1.5]. The DE
algorithm employed with K-elitism with K = 5, these are ve
best solutions over all generations.
B. Objective Evaluation
The detail variance (DV) and the background variance (BV)
are used for evaluating the objective contrast of the enhanced
image [13]. DV and BV are estimated by computing the local
variance of each pixel using the gray-levels of neighboring
pixels over an n x n window of the enhanced image. Next,
in an image for each pixel if the variance is more than a
threshold then it is classied to the foreground else the pixel
is classied to the background. The average variance of all
pixels included in the foreground class is DV, and average
variance of all pixels included in the background class is BV.
For an enhanced image the DV value increases, while the BV
value is not changed compared to the original image, then it
is supposed that the efcient contrast enhancement is realized.
In table 2 the estimated DV and BV values of the enhanced
images are given, where the threshold was chosen to be 0.01
and the window size: 3 x 3. From table 2 and table 3, the
results indicate that our proposed method is giving better than
other methods for most images.

DE based gray-level image enhancement

regardless of initial parameter values of the population. DE

adopts greedy search process to select best one out of new
solution and its parent, that provides signicant advantage of
converge performance over GA. Moreover, DE uses only few
control parameters than GA and PSO.
IV.

EXPERIMENTS AND RESULTS

In this paper, many gray-level images are used to perform

image enhancement (IE) experiment; here we presented results
of only eight images. Results of the proposed differential
evolution based image enhancement (DE-IE) are compared
with other techniques namely linear contrast stretching (LCS),
histogram equalization (HE) and PSO based image enhancement (PSO-IE). Table 1 contains description of input images
such as size, experiment details (size of the population p,
number of generation g, and window size w), tness value,
detail variance (DV) and background variance (BV). The
quality of resulted images of all methods is quantied using
same evaluation function with the threshold value 0.01 are
given in the table 2. A more detail information can be found

C. Visual Analysis of the resulted images

Results of the enhanced images of the mentioned four
algorithms are displayed in group of ve gures. If we visually
analyze the images then it is found that our proposed algorithms performance is better in most of the cases. In couple
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2014 International Conference on Signal Processing and Integrated Networks (SPIN)

TABLE I.
Image

Size

couple
eight
pout
tire
zelda

TABLE II.

DETAILS ABOUT THE ORIGINAL IMAGES

512
256
240
205
512

x
x
x
x
x

512
256
291
232
512

NP/G/W

Fitness

DV

BV

40/50/5
40/20/7
40/20/3
30/30/3
40/50/5

2.2492
0.8787
1.0922
1.9694
15.547

0.231
0.182
0.077
0.209
0.333

0.0070
0.0065
0.0087
0.0014
0.0043

reveal that most of the images our method outperforms other

methods mentioned in the above tables. The performance of
PSO algorithm is very much parameter dependent and ne
tuning of the parameters provide better result. However, DE
has few parameters need to be set and simple to use with
greater robustness than PSO. We compared the results by
considering the DV and the BV used for objective evaluation of
the enhanced images. However, the DV is not always reecting
precisely the detail content level in the image. Another precise
objective computation can be possible by considering the
number of edgels as detected by the Sobel automatic edge
detector. Image contains the higher number of edgels can be
considered as having more detail content. It is clear from table
(3) that the proposed method achieves the best detail content
in all the images.

FITNESS, DV AND BV OF THE ENHANCED IMAGES

Image

Measures

LCS

HE

PSO-IE

DE-IE

couple

Fitness
DV
BV

1.5600
0.2306
0.0039

4.0096
0.3194
0.0072

3.2222
0.3151
0.0044

3.3639
0.2828
0.0044

Eight

Fitness
DV
BV

1.3907
0.2381
0.0065

1.1286
1.1286
0.0072

2.4307
0.1139
0.0074

2.4756
0.1190
0.0072

Pout

Fitness
DV
BV

1.2516
0.1805
0.0077

1.2776
0.2912
0.0071

1.8746
0.0953
0.006

1.8842
0.0864
0.0087

The authors gratefully acknowledge the management to

support and facilities provided by the Seemanta Engineering
College, Jharpokharia, Mayurbhanj, Odisha, India to carry out
this research work.

Tire

Fitness
DV
BV

1.9514
0.2164
0.0014

1.8277
0.2643
0.0075

2.3345
0.1872
0.0013

2.3566
0.1871
0.0014

R EFERENCES

Fitness
DV
BV

1.8811
0.3739
0.0035

15.652
0.3610
0.0036

16.986
0.3284
0.0044

17.035
0.3348
0.0043

Zelda

TABLE III.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

[1]
[2]
[3]

DETAILS ABOUT THE ORIGINAL IMAGES

Image

Measures

LCS

HE

PSO-IE

DE-IE

couple
eight
pout
tire
zelda

4718
3115
3190
3198
3255

3357
5076
3599
3175
4011

8581
4121
3656
3101
3266

6960
6650
4562
3992
3268

7317
6772
5390
4040
3273

[4]

[5]
[6]
[7]

image DE-IE is comparable with PSO-IE, former is brighter

than PSO-IE image; in HE and LCS images both tables area are
dark, then table legs are not visible clearly. In eight image the
edges of all coins are more prominent in PSO-IE image than
other images. Similarly, pout image DE-IE image is brighter
than others, but it is comparable with HE image. In tire image
contrast level of DE-IE image is more than other images, but
it is comparable with PSO-IE image. In zelda image in all
cases it became blur and among them DE-IE image is more
clear. In all images it is found DE-IE images contain more
detail information than other methods. So overall performance
of DE-IE achieved visually better results than other methods.
Table three indicates DE-IE contain more edges in all images
this indicates images of DE-IE having high detail content.
V.

[8]
[9]

[10]
[11]
[12]

[13]

[14]

C ONCLUSION

In this paper we have proposed an automatic contrast

enhancement technique using differential evolution for grayscale images. The resulted images obtained by the proposed
method are compared with other image enhancement methods
(linear contrast stretching, histogram equalization and PSO
based image enhancement).Results from tables (2) and (3)

[15]

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(b)

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(e)

(e)
Fig. 2.
Couple Image: (a) Original Image, (b) Linear Contrast Stretching(LCS), (c) Histogram Equalization (HE), (d) PSO based Method (PSO-IE),
and (e) DE based Method (DE-IE)

Fig. 4. Pout Image: (a) Original Image, (b) Linear Contrast Stretching (LCS),
(c) Histogram Equalization (HE), (d) PSO based Method (PSO-IE), and (e)
DE based Method (DE-IE)

(a)

(b)

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(b)

(c)

(d)

(c)

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(e)

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Fig. 3. Eight Image: (a) Original Image, (b) Linear Contrast Stretching (LCS),
(c) Histogram Equalization (HE), (d) PSO based Method (PSO-IE), and (e)
DE based Method (DE-IE)

Fig. 5. Tire Image: (a) Original Image, (b) Linear Contrast Stretching (LCS),
(c) Histogram Equalization (HE), (d) PSO based Method (PSO-IE), and (e)
DE based Method (DE-IE)

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