• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.6-12
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• 2013

Mammography is the most common technique for the early detection of breast cancer. To diagnose correctly and treat of breast cancer efficiently, many image enhancement methods have been developed. This paper presents a nonlinear image enhancement method for the enhancement of digital mammogram. The proposed method is composed of a nonlinear function for brightness improvement and a nonlinear filter for contrast enhancement. The nonlinear function improves the brightness of dark area and extends the dynamic range of bright area, and the nonlinear filter efficiently enhances the specific regions and objects of the mammogram. The final enhanced image was obtained by combining the processed image with the nonlinear function and the filtered image with the nonlinear filter. The proposed nonlinear image enhancement method was confirmed the enhanced performance comparing with other existing methods.