Structural enhancement of digital X-ray image of bone with a suitable denoising technique

X-ray image is the noninvasive medical test that is commonly used for visual verification of bone anatomy and bone structure. X-ray image sometimes lack sharpness and clarity of bone details. In this paper we have performed a structural enhancement of digital X-ray images of bones, using Gaussian higher order derivative operation with a prior suitable PND-NLM denoising technique. To the best of our knowledge the proposed technique for structure enhancement of digital X-ray bone images is first of its kind. The denoising process efficiently cleans noise, preserves fine information and processes the large sized digital image at very high speed. The experimental results of the method on digital radiograph image demonstrate the advantage of the technique. MATLAB2009b image processing toolbox was used for simulation and verification of the proposed methodology.