The nonsubsampled contourlet transform for enhancement of microcalcifications in digital mammograms

Abstract

Microcalcifications detection plays a crucial role in the early detection of breast cancer. The enhancement of the mammographic images is one of the most important tasks during the detection process. This paper presents an algorithm for the enhancement of microcalcifications in digital mammograms. The main novelty is the application of the nonsubsampled contourlet transform and a specific edge filter to enhance the directional structures of the image in the contourlet domain. The inverse contourlet transform is applied to recover an approximation of the mammogram with the microcalcifications enhanced. Results show that the proposed method outperforms the current method based on the discrete wavelet transform. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.