An Approach to Adaptive Enhancement of Diagnostic X-Ray Images

Abstract

Digital radiography is a popular diagnostic imaging method. Denoising and enhancement have an important potential in obtaining as much easily interpretable diagnostic information as possible with reasonable absorbed doses of ionising radiation. Due to the increasing usage of high resolution and high precision images with a limited number of human experts, the computational efficiency of the denoising and enhancement becomes important. In this paper, a local adaptive image enhancement and simultaneous denoising algorithm for fulfilling the requirements of digital X-ray image enhancement is introduced. The algorithm is based on modification of the wavelet transform coefficients by a pointwise nonlinear transformation and reconstructing the enhanced image from the modified wavelet transform coefficients. The implementation of algorithm in software is simple, quick, and universal.