An approximation-weighted detail contrast enhancement filter for lesion detection on mammograms

Presents a novel approximation-weighted detail contrast enhancement (AWDCE) filter for detecting lesions in digitized mammograms employing the Daub20 wavelet transform. The AWDCE filter is implemented by weighting each pixel in the detailed images of chosen levels by the factor that is transformed from corresponding pixels in the approximation image. This ADWCE filter implementation was evaluated with the more traditional methods by using the same publicly accessible database. Experimental results show that the AWDCE filter can automatically enhance the mass contrast while preserving the image details in different scales, and that its performance is better than in previous works, especially in the contrast improvement ratio.