Enhancement of chest radiographs with gradient operators

Abstract

Reference is made to the Sobel and Roberts gradient operators used to enhance image edges. Overall, the Sobel operator was found to be superior to the Roberts operator in edge enhancement. A theoretical explanation for the superior performance of the Sobel operator was developed based on the concept of analyzing the x and y Sobel masks as linear filters. By applying pill-box, Gaussian, or median filtering prior to applying a gradient operator, noise was reduced. The pill-box and Gaussian filters were more computationally efficient than the median filter with approximately equal effectiveness in noise reduction.