Nonlinear Local Transformation Based Mammographic Image Enhancement

摘要

Mammography is one of the most effective techniques for early detection of breast cancer. The quality of the image may suffer from poor resolution or low contrast, which can effect the efficiency of radiologists. In order to improve the visual quality of mammograms, this paper introduces a new mammographic image enhancement algorithm. Firstly an intensity based nonlinear transformation is used for reducing the background tissue intensity, and secondly adaptive local contrast enhancement is realized based on local standard deviation and luminance information. The proposed method can obtain improved performance compared to alternative methods both covering objective and subjective aspects, based on 45 images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can improve the contrast effectively and enhance lesion information (microcalcifications and/or masses).