Adaptive approach for enhancement the visual quality of low-contrast medical images

Abstract

In the paper is presented one specific approach aimed at improvement of the visual quality of underexposed or low-contrast medical images. For this are developed adaptive contrast-enhancement algorithms, based on the segmentation of the image area with relatively high density of dark elements. The problem is solved changing the brightness intervals of the selected segments followed by equalization (in particular -linear stretch and skew) of the corresponding parts of the histogram. The implementation is relatively simple and permits easy adaptation of the contrasting algorithms to image contents, requiring setting of small number of parameters only. The corresponding software tools permit to change the image with consecutive steps and to evaluate the visual quality of the processed images. The original image is also available, which permits easy comparison and evaluation. The obtained results prove the efficiency of the new methods for image quality enhancement.©Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.