Image enhancement is the processing of images to improve their appearance to

human viewers or to enhance other image processing systems' performance.

Methods and objectives vary with the application.

For human viewers, as in television, the objective may be to improve

perceptual aspects: image quality, intelligibility, or visual appearance. and
for object identification by machine, an image may be preprocessed to
aid machine performance.

image enhancement is dependent on the application context, and

criteria for enhancement are often subjective or too complex to be easily
converted to useful objective measures

image enhancement algorithms tend to be simple, qualitative, and ad hoc.

in any given application, an image enhancement algorithm that performs well

for one class of images may not perform as well for other classes.
Image enhancement is closely related to image restoration.

When an image is degraded, restoration of the original image often results in

enhancement.

But there are some important differences between restoration and enhancement.
 
In image restoration, an ideal image has been degraded, and the objective is
to make the processed image resemble the original image as much as possible.
 
In image enhancement, the objective is to make the processed image better
in some sense than the unprocessed image.
In this case, the ideal image depends on the problem context and often is not
well defined.
 
e.g. as a difference, an original, undegraded image cannot be further restored
but can be enhanced by increasing sharpness through high pass filtering.
Image enhancement applications :

Image enhancement is desirable in a number of contexts

In one important class of problems, an image is enhanced by modifying its contrast

and/or dynamic range.

image, even if undegraded, will often appear better when its

e.g. a typical
edges are sharpened.

Also, if an image with a large dynamic range is recorded on a

medium with a small dynamic range, such as film or paper, the contrast
and therefore the details of the image are reduced, particularly in the very
bright and dark regions.
 
e.g.Contrast in an image taken from an airplane
is reduced when the scenery
is covered by cloud or mist. Increasing the local contrast and
reducing the overall dynamic range can significantly enhance the
quality of such an image.
In another class of enhancement problems, a degraded image may be enhanced by reducing
the degradation.

Examples of image degradation are blurring, random background noise, speckle noise, and
quantization noise.

This area of image enhancement overlaps with image restoration.

An algorithm that is simple and ad hoc, and does not attempt to exploit the characteristics of
the signal and degradation, is generally considered an enhancement algorithm.

An algorithm that is more mathematical and complex, and exploits the characteristics of the
signal and degradation with an explicit error criterion that attempts to compare the processed
image with the original undegraded image, is generally regarded as a restoration algorithm.
 
contours or edges in an object contain very important information that may be used in image
understanding applications.

First step in such case may be to preprocess an image into an edge map that consists of only
edges.

Since more accurate detection of edges in an image can enhance the performance of an
image understanding system that exploits such information.

Converting an image to its corresponding edge map may be viewed as an enhancement

process.*
Another important class of image enhancement case is the display of 2-D data
that may or may not represent the intensities of an actual image.

A low-resolution image of 128 x 128 pixels may be made more visually pleasant to a
human observer by interpolating it to generate a larger image, say 256 x 256 pixels.

In 2-D spectral estimation, the spectral estimates have traditionally been

displayed as contour plots. Although such 2-D data are not images in the
conventional sense, they can be presented as images.

We can display them as black-and-white images, or we can enhance them with

color so that their appearance may be improved and information conveyed
more clearly.
 
In other applications, such as infrared radar imaging, range information as well
as image intensities may be available.
By displaying the range information with color, relative distances of objects in
an image can be highlighted.

Even, good-quality images may be enhanced by certain types of distortion. For

example, when an object in an image is displayed with false color, the object may
stand out more clearly to a human viewer.