• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.658-665
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• 2015

In the production of medical images, noise reduction and contrast enhancement are important methods to increase qualities of processing results. By using the edge-based denoising and adaptive nonlinear histogram stretching, a novel medical image enhancement algorithm is proposed. First, a medical image is decomposed by wavelet transform, and then all high frequency sub-images are decomposed by Haar transform. At the same time, edge detection with Sobel operator is performed. Second, noises in all high frequency sub-images are reduced by edge-based soft-threshold method. Third, high frequency coefficients are further enhanced by adaptive weight values in different sub-images. Finally, an adaptive nonlinear histogram stretching method is applied to increase the contrast of resultant image. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can enhance a low contrast medical image while preserving edges effectively without blurring the details.