Image Quality Enhancement in C Programming

In today's technologically advanced and highly digitalized world, huge amounts of raw images are being captured on a daily basis. Processing these images to extract useful information and/or manipulating them is a herculean task in itself. Image enhancement has been an important facet in image processing ever since images were captured on photographic paper using silver chlorides and other photosensitive chemicals. Earlier converting negatives took more than eight hours straight. Now with the advent of computers and digital images we can do this in milliseconds. One such problem was to enhance an image. In this paper, efforts have been made for performing digital image enhancement by using Histogram Equalization and Bilinear Interpolation to enhance the contrast and scaling of the image, so that, one can say at a cursory glance that the image quality has improved. The C programming language is a good algorithm description format as it is a widely used language and one can understand the basics of image processing and how image enhancement is done at a pixel level. This paper is intended to serve as a reference for developers and programmers who are keen on learning about image manipulation by directly working with the pixel information.