2019/01/01 by Vincent Stimper, Stefan Bauer, Ralph Ernstorfer +2
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Adaptive histogram equalization #Advanced Fluorescence Microscopy Techniques #Artificial intelligence #Cell Image Analysis Techniques #Computer science #Computer vision #Contrast (vision) #Histogram #Histogram equalization #Image (mathematics) #Image processing #Pattern recognition (psychology) #Preprocessor #Spectroscopy Techniques in Biomedical and Chemical Research #Visualization #eess.IV #eess.SP #physics.data-an #q-bio.QM
paper · pdf · doi:10.1109/access.2019.2952899
published as IEEE Access 7, 165437 (2019)
openalex publication_date 2019/01/01 · arxiv created 2019/11/09 · arxiv updated 2020/05/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Contrast enhancement is an important preprocessing technique for improving the performance of downstream tasks in image processing and computer vision. Among the existing approaches based on nonlinear histogram transformations, contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) is a popular choice for dealing with 2D images obtained in natural and scientific settings. The recent hardware upgrade in data acquisition systems results in significant increase in data complexity, including their sizes and dimensions. Measurements of densely sampled data higher than three dimensions, usually composed of 3D data as a function of external parameters, are becoming commonplace in various applications in the natural sciences and engineering. The initial understanding of these complex multidimensional datasets often requires human intervention through visual examination, which may be hampered by the varying levels of contrast permeating through the dimensions. We show both qualitatively and quantitatively that using our multidimensional extension of CLAHE (MCLAHE) simultaneously on all dimensions of the datasets allows better visualization and discernment of multidimensional image features, as demonstrated using cases from 4D photoemission spectroscopy and fluorescence microscopy. Our implementation of multidimensional CLAHE in Tensorflow is publicly accessible and supports parallelization with multiple CPUs and various other hardware accelerators, including GPUs.