Medical image contrast enhancement based on improved sparrow search algorithm

Abstract The collection or transmission of medical images is often disturbed by various factors, such as insufficient brightness and noise pollution, which will result in the deterioration of image quality and significantly affect the clinical diagnosis. To improve the quality of medical images, a contrast enhancement method based on improved sparrow search algorithm is proposed in this paper. The method is divided into two steps to enhance the medical images. First, a new transform function is introduced to improve the brightness or contrast of medical images, and two parameters in the transform function are optimized by the improved sparrow search algorithm. Second, adaptive histogram equalization method with contrast limited is used to equalize the result image of the previous step to make the pixel distribution of the image more uniform. Finally, a large number of experiments and qualitative and quantitative analyses were conducted on the common data sets. The analysis results demonstrate that the presented approach outperforms some existing medical image processing approaches.