Contrast Enhancement of Medical Images Using Sigmoid-type Transfer Curves for Wavelet Coefficient Weighting Adjustment

Abstract

Pre-processing is important for digital medical images because it can contribute to the improvement of diagnostic accuracy with medical images and computer-aided diagnosis. In this paper, a novel sigmoid-type transfer curve for wavelet coefficient weighting adjustment was proposed to improve contrast of medical images. The proposed method was applied to chest radiographs, mammograms and chest CT images, and then its performance was quantitatively evaluated with contrast improvement ratio. As a result, contrasts of all applied images were obviously improved. Compared with the conventional exponential-type transfer curve, the proposed sigmoid-type transfer curve was more effective with a statistical significance(p<0.05).