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What is the linear and nonlinear contrast stretch?

Author

Emily Baldwin

Updated on March 09, 2026

What is the linear and nonlinear contrast stretch?

The idea behind contrast stretching is to increase the dynamic range of gray levels in the image being processed. Linear and nonlinear digital techniques are two widely practiced methods of increasing the contrast of an image.

What is linear contrast stretching in image processing?

Contrast stretching (often called normalization) is a simple image enhancement technique that attempts to improve the contrast in an image by `stretching’ the range of intensity values it contains to span a desired range of values, e.g. the the full range of pixel values that the image type concerned allows.

What is linear stretching?

Linear stretching is the simplest transform and usually (though not always) a very bad one. If the data histogram is relatively uniform (e.g., like a velocity map) then a linear stretch where the display values are linearly spaced in data values between some minimum and maximum works well.

Where is contrast stretching used?

Figure 3.1 shows histograms of low contrast images. Contrast stretching is a technique used to stretch the histogram of an image so that the full dynamic range of the image is filled. Listing 3.1 shows one of the two most popular contrast stretching techniques, basic contrast stretching.

What is a linear contrast?

In statistics, particularly in analysis of variance and linear regression, a contrast is a linear combination of variables (parameters or statistics) whose coefficients add up to zero, allowing comparison of different treatments.

How do you calculate linear contrast stretching?

Contrast Stretching

  1. When r1 =s1 and r2=s2, transformation becomes a Linear function.
  2. When r1=r2, s1=0 and s2=L-1, transformation becomes a thresholding function.
  3. When (r1, s1) = (rmin, 0) and (r2, s2) = (rmax, L-1), this is known as Min-Max Stretching.

What is contrast stretching and thresholding?

Where as when Thresholding is applied once to an input image it gives Binary output Image. Contrast Stretching Tx function increases the dynamic range of modified image.

What is non linear stretching?

Non linear stretching is the work horse for producing “pretty pictures” with astrophotography. This process completely destroys the data for any scientific use and is frowned upon by some purists. I usually apply this successively to the image until the darkest parts get to a brightness above 30.

How do you choose contrast coefficients?

To specify a contrast, we need only specify the weights. To compare M0 versus M2, use the coefficients -1, 1, 0. When applied to the group means, these coefficients result in the comparison M0(-1) + M2(1) + M4(0) which reduces to M2-M0. That is, this contrast results in the difference between two group means.

Why do we do contrast stretching?

Generally, an image can be enhanced by spreading out the range of scene illumination. This procedure is called contrast stretching. Our main goal in this paper is to apply a contrast enhancement technique to recover an image from blurred images, also improve image quality of it.