Fast Fractal Coding Method for the Detection of Microcalcification in Mammograms

The presence of microcalcifications in mammograms can be considered as an early indication of breast cancer. A fast fractal block coding method to model the mammograms for detecting the presence of microcalcifications is presented in this paper. The conventional fractal image coding method takes enormous amount of time during the fractal block encoding procedure. In the proposed method, the image is divided into shade and non shade blocks based on the dynamic range, and only non shade blocks are encoded using the fractal encoding technique. Since the number of image blocks is considerably reduced in the matching domain search pool, a saving of 97.996% of the encoding time is obtained as compared to the conventional fractal coding method, for modeling mammograms. The above developed mammograms are used for detecting microcalcifications and a diagnostic efficiency of 85.7% is obtained for the 28 mammograms used.