Digital Image Enhancement Techniques for Dental Radiographs
E. Priya · Advances in medical technologies and clinical practice book series · 2018
Dental radiographs suffer frequently from issues such as low contrast and non-uniform illumination. The first step, indeed a significant step, is to enhance these digital images to prepare them for successful post-processing. This pre-processing stage assists to increase the contrast between the foreground that is the teeth and bone from the background regions. In this chapter, image enhancement methods based on spatial, frequency, and spatial-frequency are implemented. The dental radiographs used are available in the public database. The performance of the enhancement methods is validated using qualitative and quantitative measures. It is observed from the results that the enhancement method aids in improving dental features such as crowns, fillings, and bridges. This enables human identification and diagnostic purpose in the way it is possible to identify a variety of diseases. It also prevents the need for a remake, saving the patient from an additional treatment.