Patent ID: 7840066

Claim:
A method for enhancing the quality of at least a portion of an electronic image comprising a plurality of original image components, each original image component having one of a plurality of original gray-level values that are distributed over a grayscale, the method comprising: using a processor to perform the steps of: (a) establishing a first histogram of the gray-level values over the grayscale; (b) grouping the gray-level values into a second histogram having a number of bins that optimizes an image quality criterion, each bin containing a subset of the original image components of the at least a portion of the electronic image; (c) redistributing at least a portion of the bins over the grayscale to produce redistributed image components having a redistributed gray level established by the redistributing; and (d) ungrouping the redistributed image components from each bin to establish enhanced image components having an enhanced gray level to produce an enhanced electronic image.