Gray-level slicing is a technique used to highlight a specific range of gray levels in an image. There are two main approaches: 1) display the range of interest as white and other levels as black, and 2) brighten the range of interest while preserving other levels. Bit-plane slicing works similarly but highlights the contribution of each bit that makes up pixel values. Histograms provide a graphical representation of pixel intensity distributions in an image and are useful for image enhancement, statistics, and other processing tasks like compression and segmentation. Histogram equalization increases contrast by spreading out the most frequent intensity values.