Enhancement of medical image details via wavelet homomorphic filtering transform

Abstract

A new medical image enhancement algorithm based on spatial frequency domain is presented in this article. The medical image is first divided into several sub-images based on dyadic wavelet scale analysis. At each level, different directional sub-band images can reflect the different characteristics of the image. A low-frequency sub-band image maintains the original image content information, and high-frequency sub-band images represent image details such as edges and regional boundaries. The corresponding sub-band images are then enhanced by different Butterworth homomorphic filtering functions, which can attenuate the low frequencies and amplify the high frequencies. A linear adjustment is carried out on the low frequency of the highest level. Then, the wavelet reconstruction course is used to obtain the final enhanced image. Experiments on magnetic resonance images of temporomandibular joint soft tissues have shown that the proposed method can effectively eliminate the non-uniform luminance distribution of medical images. Its performance is much better than traditional Butterworth homomorphic filtering algorithm whether in subjective vision quality or objective evaluations such as detailed information entropy and average gradient. © 2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston 2014.