Contrast enhancement of microscopy images using image phase information

Contrast enhancement is an important preprocessing step for the analysis of microscopy images. The main aim of contrast enhancement techniques is to increase the visibility of the cell structures and organelles by modifying the spatial characteristics of the image. In this paper, phase information-based contrast enhancement framework is proposed to overcome the limitations of existing image enhancement techniques. Inspired by the groundbreaking design of the phase contrast microscopy (PCM), the proposed image enhancement framework transforms the changes in image phase into the variations of magnitude to enhance the structural details of the image and to improve visibility. In addition, the concept of selective variation (SV) technique is introduced and enhancement parameters are optimized using SV. The experimental studies that were carried out on microscopy images show that the proposed scheme outperforms the baseline enhancement frameworks. The contrast enhanced images produced by the proposed method have comparable cellular texture structure as PCM images.