Enhancement of satellite images based on CLAHE and augmented elk herd optimizer

Satellite images often have very narrow brightness value ranges, so it is necessary to enhance the contrast and brightness, maintain the quality of visual information, and preserve pertinent details in the images before conducting additional analysis. This is because improving the brightness and contrast of images is crucial to image processing and analysis as it makes it easier for people to identify and comprehend the images. The Incomplete Beta Function (IBF) is a popular transformation function for Image Contrast Enhancement (ICE). Nevertheless, IBF has modest efficiency in parameter selection, a small set of adjustable parameters for stretching regions with high or low gray levels, and image enhancement is almost ineffective with stretching at either end. Meta-heuristic algorithms have been utilized efficiently and effectively over the past few decades to solve complicated image processing problems. This paper presents an Augmented version of the Elk Herd Optimizer (AEHO) combined with other traditional ICE techniques to improve edge details, entropy, local contrast, and local brightness of low-contrast natural and satellite images. The AEHO method employs a multi-stage strategic procedure, where its mathematical model undergoes several enhancements before being applied to ICE to allow for further exploration and exploitation of its features. This method uses a pre-established fitness criterion for the purpose of optimizing a set of parameters to rework a well-known transformation function and an effective assessment technique as an objective standard for this purpose. In the proposed image enhancement model, contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization was first applied as a prior step to ameliorate the color intensity. Then, the optimal IBF’s parameters for ICE were adaptively determined using AEHO. After that, bilateral gamma correction was used to improve the visual quality of images without sacrificing edge details or natural color quality. The proposed AEHO-based image enhancement model is tested on natural scenes, certain standard images, and publicly available satellite images. In addition to other five techniques built on based on pre-existing meta-heuristics, the performance of the proposed method was compared against other well-known state-of-the-art image enhancement algorithms. The objective evaluation of the enhancement algorithms was achieved utilizing a variety of full-reference, no-reference, and pertinent performance evaluation norms. The experimental findings illustrated that the proposed image enhancement method can successfully outperform several other algorithms that employed the same image enhancement model as AEHO in addition to other conventional image enhancement methods included for comparison. The results on ten natural and satellite color images showed that the presented method performs better than all other comparative methods in the corresponding evaluation criteria in terms of average peak signal-to-noise ratio, average universal quality index, average structural contrast-quality index, and average values of discrete entropy results, which are more than 32.30, 94.0%, 0.98.9%, and 7.4, respectively. In a nutshell, AEHO can be an efficient method that can be used to tackle several image processing problems.