Luminosity-Adaptive Contrast Enhancement Using CLAHE for Retinal Fundus Images with Quantitative Validation and Comparative Analysis

Abstract

Background: Retinal fundus imaging is central to the early diagnosis of sight-threatening conditions including diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, and retinal vein occlusion. Clinical utility of fundus images is routinely compromised by non-uniform illumination, motion blur, and low contrast - artefacts that increase the risk of diagnostic error. Effective image enhancement is therefore a prerequisite for reliable computer-aided ophthalmic diagnosis. Methods: This study proposes a two-stage image enhancement pipeline combining luminosity correction via HSV colour space decomposition with Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) applied exclusively to the Value (V) channel. Experiments are conducted on the publicly available DRIVE dataset (40 retinal fundus images, 584 x 565 pixels, Canon CR5 camera, ophthalmologist-annotated ground truth). Quantitative evaluation employs Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), and Contrast-to-Noise Ratio (CNR). Baseline comparisons include standard Histogram Equalization (HE) and Adaptive Histogram Equalization (AHE). A binary masking step is subsequently applied to isolate hyper-reflective regions consistent with vascular pathology. Results: The proposed method achieves PSNR = 29.3 dB, SSIM = 0.91, and CNR = 3.12 - outperforming HE (PSNR = 21.4 dB, SSIM = 0.74) and AHE (PSNR = 23.1 dB, SSIM = 0.79) across all metrics, with an average processing time of 0.14 seconds per image. Conclusions: The combined luminosity-CLAHE pipeline yields measurably superior contrast and structural fidelity compared to established baseline methods, with processing speed compatible with clinical screening workflows. Limitations and directions for deep-learning-based comparison are discussed.