MATLAB | Display histogram of a grayscale Image

An image histogram is chart representation of the distribution of intensities in an Indexed image or grayscale image. It shows how many times each intensity value in image occurs.

Code #1: Display histogram of an image using MATLAB library function.

% Read an Image in MATLAB Environment
img=imread('apple.jpg');

% Convert image to grayscale image
# if read image is an RGB image
img=rgb2gray(img);

% Show histogram of image
# using imhist() function
imhist(img);

Code #2: Display Histogram of an Image without using MATLAB Library function.

Approach :

• Read the source image file into image matrix
• Convert it to grayscale, if it is an RGB image
• Iterate over image matrix and count the frequency of every possible value of intensity
• plot the counted frequency

% Read source image file
img = imread('apple.jpg');

% Convert image to grayscale image
img=rgb2gray(img);

% get the dimension of the image
[x, y] = size(img);


% Create a frequency array of size 256
frequency = 1 : 256;

count = 0;

% Iterate over grayscale image matrix
% for every possible intensity value
% and count them

for i = 1 : 256
    for j = 1 : x
        for k = 1 : y

            % if image pixel value at location (j, k) is i-1
            % then increment count
            if img(j, k) == i-1
                    count = count + 1;
            end
        end
    end
    % update ith position of frequency array with count
    frequency(i) = count;

    % reset count
    count = 0;

end


n = 0 : 255;

% Display Histogram
stem(n, frequency);

grid on;
ylabel('Number of pixels with such intensity levels -->');
xlabel('Intensity Levels  -->');
title('HISTOGRAM OF THE IMAGE');

Input:

Output: