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Pnmhisteq User Manual(0) Pnmhisteq User Manual(0)
NAME
pnmhisteq - histogram equalize a PNM image
SYNOPSIS
pnmhisteq
[-gray]
[-noblack] [-nowhite]
[-rmap pgmfile]
[-wmap pgmfile]
[-verbose]
[pnmfile]
DESCRIPTION
This program is part of Netpbm(1).
pnmhisteq increases the contrast of a PGM or PPM image through the technique of "histogram
equalization."[1]
pnmhisteq computes a histogram of the luminosity of the pixels in the image. It then cal-
culates a mapping between each luminosity and a new luminosity such that it spreads out
intensity levels around histogram peaks and compresses them at troughs. I.e. it moves
pixels around in the histogram so as to make it flat. It applies that mapping to the
input image to produce the output image. The effect of this is that the image has equal
numbers of pixels at each possible intensity level, which means it uses the available lev-
els of intensity more efficiently and thereby has more visible detail.
Mathematically, the luminosity mapping is this: Assume the pixels are sorted by luminosity
into B buckets numbered from 0 (lowest luminosity) to B-1. N[i] is the number of pixels
in bucket i. T is the total number of pixels (sum of N[i] over all i). W is the luminos-
ity of white.
pnmhisteq replaces an input pixel whose luminosity falls into bucket j with one whose
luminosity is:
j
---
\
> (N[i] / T) * W
/
---
i=0
Considering a grayscale image for simplicity, this means that pixels in the most luminous
bucket become white. Pixels in the 10th per centile of luminosity become 10% of white.
pnmhisteq maps a single luminosity in the input to a single luminosity in the output.
That means if pixels A and B both have luminosity .2 in the input, and pixel A has lumi-
nosity .4 in the output, pixel B also has luminosity .4 in the output. And since the
luminosities in the input are not continuous, the luminosities in the output aren't either
and pnmhisteq doesn't meet the ideal of having exactly the same number of pixels of each
luminosity in the output.
If you're processing a related set of images, for example frames of an animation, it's
generally best to apply the same luminosity mapping to every frame, since otherwise you'll
get distracting frame-to-frame changes in the brightness of objects. pnmhisteq's -wmap
option allows you to save, as a PGM image, the luminosity map it computes from an image.
The -rmap option causes pnmisteq to use such an image as its luminosity map.
So you can run pnmhisteq with -wmap on a composite you created with pnmcat of the images
you intend to process. Then, you can run pnmisteq with -rmap on each of the individual
images, using the luminosity map you generated from the composite.
Use pnmhistmap to see the result. Run a color image through ppmtopgm first so that you
see a histogram of the luminosity instead of histograms of the three color components. It
should generally show a flat histogram. But because of the quantization effects described
above, you might see high bars interleaved with low bars, with the local average being
flat. To see local averages, use the -width option of pnmhistmap.
OPTIONS
You can abbreviate any option to its shortest unique prefix.
-gray When processing a color image, only gray pixels (those with identical red, green,
and blue values) are included in the histogram and modified in the output image.
This is a special purpose option intended for images where the actual data are gray
scale, with color annotations you don't want modified. Weather satellite images
that show continent outlines in color are best processed using this option. The
option has no effect when the input is a graymap.
-noblack
Do not include black pixels in the equalization. The black pixels in the output
are exactly the black pixels in the input and the number of black pixels does not
affect the color of any other pixels.
Sometimes, black isn't as much a color as a background or annotation for the real
colors, so you want to treat it specially this way. Think of a picture of stars,
which is nearly all black, but with lots of stars of different brightness. You
want to change the brightnesses of the stars to maximize contrast between them, but
if you considered the blackness to be significant, all the stars would end up close
to full white.
This option was new in Netpbm 10.70 (March 2015).
-nowhite
Same as -noblack, but for the white pixels.
This option was new in Netpbm 10.70 (March 2015).
-rmap mapfile
Process the image using the luminosity map specified by the PGM file mapfile.
The PGM image, usually created by an earlier run of pnmhisteq with the -wmap
option, contains a single row with number of columns equal to the maxval (greatest
intensity value) of the image plus one. Each pixel in the image is transformed by
looking up its luminosity in the corresponding column in the map file (column num-
ber = luminosity) and changing it to the value given by that column.
-wmap mapfile
Creates a PGM file mapfile, containing the luminosity map computed from the his-
togram of the input image. This map file can be read on subsequent runs of pnmhis-
teq with the -rmap option, allowing a group of images to be processed with an iden-
tical map.
-verbose
Prints the histogram and luminosity map on Standard Error.
LIMITATIONS
Histogram equalization is effective for increasing the visible detail in scientific
imagery and in some continuous-tone pictures. It is often too drastic, however, for
scanned halftone images, where it does an excellent job of making halftone artifacts
apparent. You might want to experiment with pnmnorm and pnmgamma for more subtle contrast
enhancement.
The luminosity map file supplied by the -rmap option must have the same maxval as the
input image. This is always the case when the map file was created by the -wmap option of
pnmhisteq. If this restriction causes a problem, simply adjust the maxval of the map with
pamdepth to agree with the input image.
If the input is a PBM file (on which histogram equalization is an identity operation), the
only effect of passing the file through pnmhisteq will be the passage of time.
SEE ALSO
pnmnorm(1), pnmcat(1), pamdepth(1), pnmgamma(1), pnm(1),
[1] Russ, John C. The Image Processing Handbook. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 1992. Pages
105-110.
DOCUMENT SOURCE
This manual page was generated by the Netpbm tool 'makeman' from HTML source. The master
documentation is at
http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pnmhisteq.html
netpbm documentation 22 March 2015 Pnmhisteq User Manual(0)
Generated by $Id: phpMan.php,v 4.55 2007/09/05 04:42:51 chedong Exp $ Author: Che Dong
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