Contrast Enhancement and Noise Reduction of chest X-ray images

ABSTRACT

X-ray radiography is used to get medical images of body parts such as chest, bones etc. These images help in detection of anomaly in inspected body part, for eg- Chest X-ray are used for detection of many diseases such as Covid-19, Pneumonia and Cancer. However, images obtained from radiography are low in contrast and with high noise level. Enhancement of an image is very crucial for the diagnostic purpose, as currently medical images are very helpful in identifying various disease and problem in human body. With the technical support, the enhancement is considered one of the first-rate methods for the betterment of visualization and raising the standard for understanding and clearing the image details. In our work, we have focused on the contrast enhancement and noise reduction, using Histogram equalization, CLAHE (Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization), median filter and DCT filter for chest X-ray images of COVID-19 positive patients. The dataset of 6,334 images are collected from the Kaggle repository. All these methods are combined and as a result, has provided the best output by giving a colored enhanced image, highlighting the major details. This work will be helpful in the diagnosis of various kind of the diseases from radiographic approach. In the future, we will extend the process for the diagnostic part of COVID-19 from the enhanced images dataset, which will help in easy detection and work as a technological support to healthcare system. © 2022 IEEE.