Contrast Enhancement of Medical X-Ray Image Using Morphological Operators with Optimal Structuring Element

TL;DR

This paper introduces a morphological operator-based contrast enhancement method for X-ray images, improving visualization of bones and tissues, aiding faster and more accurate medical diagnosis.

Contribution

It proposes an automatic structuring element selection technique using gradient magnitude for enhanced morphological contrast enhancement of X-ray images.

Findings

Better visualization of bone and soft tissue structures.

Improved contrast compared to existing enhancement methods.

Effective on various X-ray image databases.

Abstract

To guide surgical and medical treatment X-ray images have been used by physicians in every modern healthcare organization and hospitals. Doctor's evaluation process and disease identification in the area of skeletal system can be performed in a faster and efficient way with the help of X-ray imaging technique as they can depict bone structure painlessly. This paper presents an efficient contrast enhancement technique using morphological operators which will help to visualize important bone segments and soft tissues more clearly. Top-hat and Bottom-hat transform are utilized to enhance the image where gradient magnitude value is calculated for automatically selecting the structuring element (SE) size. Experimental evaluation on different x-ray imaging databases shows the effectiveness of our method which also produces comparatively better output against some existing image enhancement techniques.