Panoramic Dental Radiography Image Enhancement Using Multiscale Mathematical Morphology.

Panoramic dental radiography is one of the most used images of the different dental specialties. This radiography provides information about the anatomical structures of the teeth. The correct evaluation of these radiographs is associated with a good quality of the image obtained. In this study, 598 patients were consecutively selected to undergo dental panoramic radiography at the Department of Radiology of the Faculty of Dentistry, Universidad Nacional de Asunción. Contrast enhancement techniques are used to enhance the visual quality of panoramic dental radiographs. Specifically, this article presents a new algorithm for contrast, detail and edge enhancement of panoramic dental radiographs. The proposed algorithm is called Multi-Scale Top-Hat transform powered by Geodesic Reconstruction for panoramic dental radiography enhancement (MSTHGR). This algorithm is based on multi-scale mathematical morphology techniques. The proposal extracts multiple features of brightness and darkness, through the reconstruction of the marker (obtained by the Top-Hat transformation by reconstruction) starting from the mask (obtained by the classic Top-Hat transformation). The maximum characteristics of brightness and darkness are added to the dental panoramic radiography. In this way, the contrast, details and edges of the panoramic radiographs of teeth are improved. For the tests, MSTHGR was compared with the following algorithms: Geodesic Reconstruction Multiscale Morphology Contrast Enhancement (GRMMCE), Histogram Equalization (HE), Brightness Preserving Bi-Histogram Equalization (BBHE), Dual Sub-Image Histogram Equalization (DSIHE), Minimum Mean Brightness Error Bi-Histogram Equalization (MMBEBHE), Quadri-Histogram Equalization with Limited Contrast (QHELC), Contrast-Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) and Gamma Correction (GC). Experimentally, the numerical results show that the MSTHGR obtained the best results with respect to the Contrast Improvement Ratio (CIR), Entropy (E) and Spatial Frequency (SF) metrics. This indicates that the algorithm performs better local enhancements on panoramic radiographs, improving their details and edges.

Entropy and Contrast Enhancement of Infrared Thermal Images Using the Multiscale Top-Hat Transform.

Discrete entropy is used to measure the content of an image, where a higher value indicates an image with richer details. Infrared images are capable of revealing important hidden targets. The disadvantage of this type of image is that their low contrast and level of detail are not consistent with human visual perception. These problems can be caused by variations of the environment or by limitations of the cameras that capture the images. In this work we propose a method that improves the details of infrared images, increasing their entropy, preserving their natural appearance, and enhancing contrast. The proposed method extracts multiple features of brightness and darkness from the infrared image. This is done by means of the multiscale top-hat transform. To improve the infrared image, multiple scales are added to the bright areas and multiple areas of darkness are subtracted. The method was tested with 450 infrared thermal images from a public database. Evaluation of the experimental results shows that the proposed method improves the details of the image by increasing entropy, also preserving natural appearance and enhancing the contrast of infrared thermal images.