Regional contrast enhancement and data compression for digital mammographic images
Ji Chen, Michael J. Flynn, Murray Rebner · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1993
The wide dynamic range of mammograms poses problems for displaying images on an electronic monitor and printing images through a laser printer. In addition, digital mammograms require a large amount of storage and network transmission bandwidth. We applied contrast enhancement and data compression to the segmented images to solve these problems. Using both image intensity and Gaussian filtered images, we separated the original image into three regions: the interior region, the skinline transition region, and the exterior region. In the transition region, unsharp masking process was applied and an adaptive density shift was used to simulate the process of highlighting with a spot light. The exterior region was set to a high density to reduce glare. The interior and skinline regions are the diagnostically informative areas that need to be preserved. Visually lossless coding was done for the interior by the wavelet or subband transform coding method. This was used because there are no block artifacts and a lowpass filtered image is generated by the transform. The exterior region can be represented by a bit-plane image containing only the labeling information or represented by the lower resolution transform coefficients. Therefore, by applying filters of different scales, we can accomplish region segmentation and data compression.