Contrast Improvement of Mammographic Masses Using Adaptive Volterra Filter

Due to ill-performance of X-ray hardware systems, mammographic images are generally noisy with poor radiographic resolution. This leads to improper visualization of lesion details. This paper presents an improved Volterra filter design known as Adaptive Volterra filter for contrast enhancement of mammograms. The operation of the adaptive filter proposed in this work can be classified as Type-0, Type-1 and Type-2 depending upon the nature of background tissues (fatty, fatty-glandular or dense) in the mammogram. This filter is considered as a Taylor series with memory whose truncation to the first non-linear term may lead to a simpler and effective representation. Computer simulations are performed on digital mammograms from MIAS database yielding promising improvement in contrast of the targeted lesion along with reasonable suppression of background in comparison to other enhancement techniques.

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