Foldscope Image Enhancement in HSV Space by PSO Optimization Technique

Abstract

This work focuses on detail and contrast enhancement of microscopic images generated by Foldscope and captured by simple smart phone. Being light-weight, portable and affordable, the Foldscope can be used in place of traditional microscope which is bulky, expensive and complex. Indeed, the Foldscope generated images are of low contrast and illumination which provide less cell details than the traditional microscopic images. Therefore, it is significant to enhance Foldscope image quality using advanced image processing techniques. In this direction, an image enhancement technique using LoG filter and linear contrast stretching method has been proposed. It enhances an image in HSV space by separating the V-Component into high and low frequencies. Further, better enhancement has been achieved by employing population-based optimization (PSO) technique. For experimental validation, in total, 10 Foldscope images have been considered. The quality of the enhanced images has been examined based on Entropy, PSNR and SSIM scores. Furthermore, a comparative study with traditional GHE and CLAHE technique shows that the proposed method is superior. Such results reveal that the proposed method can be used for low quality image enhancement.