Contrast Stretching

A simple image enhancement technique that attempts to improve the contrast of an Image.

Contrast stretching is a simple image enhancement technique that attempts to improve the contrast in an image by `stretching' the range of intensity values it contains to span a desired range of values, e.g. the full range of pixel values that the image type concerned allows. It differs from the more sophisticated histogram equalization in that it can only apply a linear scaling function to the image pixel values. As a result the `enhancement' is less harsh.