Colorization of Medical Images
Przemysław Łagodziński, Bogdan Smołka · Hokkaido University Collection of Scholarly and Academic Papers (Hokkaido University) · 2009
Colorization is a term used to describe a computerized process for adding color to black and white pictures, movies or TV programs. This process can also be used to convert the gray scale medical images to their colorized version, as color increases the visual appeal of an image and it also makes a medical visualization more attractive. Changes in color are more easily perceived than changes in shades of gray and therefore this procedure makes the interpretation and understanding of the image easier. During colorization process a scalar value representing pixel's intensity is being replaced by a vector in a given color space. Since the mapping between intensity and color has no inherently correct solution, human interaction and external information usually plays a large role. In this paper we present a novel colorization method based on the morphological distance transformation which considers the image structures to automatically propagate the color inserted into the image by a user. The effectiveness of the algorithm allows to work interactively and to obtain desired results promptly after providing the color information. In the paper we show that the proposed technique allows for high quality colorization of medical images.