A robust polynomial filtering framework for mammographic image enhancement from biomedical sensors

Abstract

This paper presents a non-linear framework employing a robust polynomial filter for accomplishing enhancement of mammographic abnormalities outcoming from biomedical instrumentation, i.e., X-rays instrumentation. The approach proposed in this paper uses a linear combination of Type-0 and Type-II polynomial filters as a generalized filtering solution to achieve enhancement of mammographic masses and calcifications irrespective of the nature of background tissues. A Type-0 filter provides contrast enhancement, suppressing the ill-effects of background noise. On the other hand, Type-II filter performs edge enhancement leading to preservation of finer details. Contrast improvement index is used as a performance measure to quantify the degree of improvement in contrast of the region-of interest. In addition, estimation of signal-to-noise ratio (in terms of PSNR and ASNR) is carried out to account for the suppression in background noise levels and over-enhancements of the processed mammograms. These measures are used as a mechanism to optimally select the filter parameters and also serve as a quantifying platform to compare the performance of the proposed filter with other non-linear enhancement techniques to be used for diverse biomedical image sensors. © 2013 IEEE.