Rank-ordered filter for edge enhancement of cellular images using interval type II fuzzy set

Abstract. An edge-enhancement technique using an interval type II fuzzy set that uses rank-ordered filter to enhance the edges of cellular images is proposed. When cellular images from any laboratory are digitized, scanned, and stored, some kind of degradation occurs, and directly using a rank-ordered filter may not produce clear edges. These images contain uncertainties, present in edges or boundaries of the image. Fuzzy sets that take into account these uncertainties may be a good tool to process these images. However, a fuzzy set sometimes does not produce better results. We used an interval type II fuzzy set, which considers the uncertainty in a different way. It considers the membership function in the fuzzy set as “fuzzy,” so the membership values lie within an interval range. A type II fuzzy set has upper and lower membership levels, and with the two levels, a new membership function is computed using Hamacher t-conorm. A new fuzzy image is formed. A rank-ordered filter is applied to the image to obtain an edge-enhanced image. The proposed method is compared with the existing methods visually and quantitatively using entropic method. Entropy of the proposed method is higher (0.4418) than the morphology method (0.2275), crisp method (0.3599), and Sobel method (0.2669), implying that the proposed method is better.