Breast sonogram and mammogram enhancement using hybrid and repetitive smoothing-sharpening technique

A novel hybrid and repetitive smoothing-sharpening (HRSST) technique is proposed and its impact is assessed to beneficially enhance sonogram and mammogram images. The technique aims to gain and combine the advantages of both the sharpening process that aims to highlight sudden changes in the image intensity, with the advantages of iterative image smoothing, which is usually applied to remove random noise from digital images. Nevertheless the developed technique also eliminates the drawbacks of each of the two sharpening and smoothing techniques resulting from their individual application in image processing field. The proposed technique is tested on both breast ultra-sound (BUS) as well as breast X-ray mammograms. Results show that the proposed methodology has high potential to advantageously enhance the image contrast hence giving extra aid to radiologists to detect and classify sonograms and mammograms.