A multiscale image enhancement method for calcification detection in screening mammograms

Abstract

Image enhancement technologies have been widely used for improving the quality of the images for screening mammograms. In this paper, we will focus on the enhancement of breast calcifications, which are the deposits of calcium that can be seen on a mammogram of the breast. In the proposed method, the original image and the normalized gradient image of the original image are first decomposed into a multi-level Laplacian pyramids, and then the features in different scales are enhanced level by level based on a contrast measure during the reconstruction stage. Because the importance of different levels is different, different weights are used in different levels. Experiments proved the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.