Contrast enhancement of mammographic images using guided image filtering

Abstract

Mammography is the most effective method for the early detection and diagnosis of breast cancer diseases. However, mammographic images contaminated by noise generally need image enhancement techniques to aid interpretation. The paper proposes a new image contrast enhancement method for digital mammograms based on guided image filtering method. Guided image filtering is a non-iterative, non-linear filter, which not only smoothes low gradient regions, but also preserve strong edges. Analogously to the bilateral filter, this filter has edge-preserving properties, but can be implemented in a very fast way. Thus, we adopt guided image filtering algorithm to increase the contrast in mammograms for human easily extracting of suspicious regions. Experimental results show that the proposed method gives superior image quality compared to other enhancement methods. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.