IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ADVANCES IN ENGINEERING &TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH (ICAETR - 2014), AUGUST

01-02, 2014, DR. VIRENDRA SWARUP GROUP OF INSTITUTIONS, UNNAO, INDIA

Bio-Medical Image Enhancement Based On

Spatial Domain Technique
Khushhal Jindal, Kriti Gupta, Manan Jain, Manmohan Maheshwari
Department of CSE & IT
ITM University
Gurgaon, India
AbstractThis paper presents a new technique of biomedical image enhancement that ameliorates the subjective
quality of medical images. In this paper, spatial domain
technique is used with an eclectic strategy for enhancing the
image which comprises of methods like edge detection,
smoothing, power law transform and high-boost filter. This
technique is analyzed on dark medical images and the result
is verified by comparing the entropy at different gamma
values, further it can also be verified by human
visualization. The result presented in this paper
demonstrates that the application of spatial domain
technique on a dark medical image yields a better quality,
which makes it suitable for pre-processing of medical image
applications.
Index Terms Histogram equalization; Image
enhancement; Non-linear transform; Spatial domain;
I.

INTRODUCTION

Bio-medical images are of great importance as they can

be a useful tool when diagnosing and analyzing functions
of a human body part. Image enhancement of these
images is an important technique which plays a vital role
in image processing by improving visual effects of the
image. The purpose of this technique is to boost specific
features of the image by reducing the noise, adjusting the
image contrast and increasing the brightness level for
diagnosis and analysis [1].
Image enhancement is the process of operating an
image so that the result is more appropriate for a specific
application than the original. For example, a method that
is very useful for enhancing bio-medical images may not
be suitable for enhancing satellite images.
The general motive of image enhancement is to enhance
or improve the image in a way that extracts information
out of it. Standard enhancement operation involves
removal of noises from the image. Image enhancement is
used as a pre-processing step in many computer vision

978-1-4799-6393-5/14/$31.00 2014 IEEE

applications to simplify the vision for example to enhance

the edges of an object to facilitate guidance of a robotic
gripper. Image enhancement is also used for postprocessing to generate a desirable visual image.
Some fundamental image enhancement methods can be
applied to restore the image contrast. One of such
methods involves the use of laplacian operator which
focuses on highlighting the edges of the image. The result
after the application of laplacian operator is subtracted
from the original image and sharpened image is formed
with fine edges.
Histogram equalization is another important method
which enhances the image contrast where the histogram
of the resultant image is as flat as possible [2]. Histogram
provides more insight about contrast and brightness [3-6].
Smoothing filter such as average filter is applied which
reduces the noises from the image. This method provides
better performance as it uses spatial domain technique in
which image pixels are manipulated directly.
The rest of the paper is structured in the following way.
Section contains the requisite background. Section
comprises of the proposed technique. In section V, all the
experimental results are illustrated. Section V includes the
conclusion of this paper.
II.

BACKGROUND

This section provides description about different

methods so as to make the proposed technique lucid.
A.

Edge Detection

Edges are significant local change in the intensity of an

image. Edge detection is a method in image processing
which involves procuring the boundaries of the object
within an image. The key utilization of edge detection is
in image segmentation and data extraction in certain areas
such as image enhancement and computer vision [7].

Sobel operator performs a 2-D spatial gradient

measurement on the image and emphasizes the regions of
high spatial frequency that correspond to the edges.
Typically it is used to find an approximate absolute
gradient magnitude at each point in the input gray scale
image. The nal step in the sobel lter approximates the
gradient magnitude based on the partial derivatives
(Dx(x,y), Dy(x,y)) from the last steps. The magnitude of
the gradient, which is the result of the sobel filter S(x,y),
is S(x,y) = q
B. Laplacian Operator
A laplacian operator is an edge detector used to
compute the second derivatives of an image. This
determines if a change in adjacent pixel values is from an
edge or continuous progression. Laplacian filter kernels
usually contain negative values in a cross pattern way.
The corners are either zero or positive numbers. The
center value can be negative or positive. The following is
an example of a 3x3 kernel of a laplacian filter.

present in the power-law equation is known as gamma

[8].
D. Histogram equalization
Histograms are used to provide useful image statistics
and are basis for numerous spatial domain processing
techniques. These are useful for image enhancement,
image compression and segmentation. Histogram
equalization is helpful in providing better distribution of
intensities in the histogram in order to upsurge the global
contrast in images [3-6]. By equalization, areas of local
lower contrast gain higher contrast and this is achieved by
diversifying most frequent intensity values. Intensity
values of input image are mapped so that the resulting
images histogram has just about uniform distribution.

C. Intensity Transformation Functions

Intensity transformations are considered easiest among
all the methods of image processing. The pixel values are
denoted by r and s before and after processing,
respectively. This relation is of the form s=T(r) where, T
is a transformation that maps a pixel value r into a pixel
value. The values of the transformation function in digital
image processing are typically stored in a onedimensional array and the mappings from r to s are
implemented via table lookups. In gray-level
transformation of 8-bit image, the table consists of 256
entries for the values of T for having the range in between
[0,255].
Here, and c are positive constants. Different
enhancements levels can be procured for various values of
[11]. Different clarity and intensities are shown
indifferent monitors. General form of expression is
written as s = c(r +), so as to account for an offset
which is useful for some measurable output when the
input is zero typically, an issue of display calibration.
When >1, dark values are compressed and bright
values are expanded and when < 1 dark values are
compressed and bright values are compressed. The curves
that are generated with <1 have contrasted effect from
curves generated with >1. Finally, it diminishes to the
identity transformation when c==1. Response of the
devices used for printing, image capturing and display
vary according to a power law. Traditionally, exponent

Figure x: Histogram equalization of skeleton image

A transformation function of importance in image

processing is represented as:
s=T(r)=

r(w)dw

Input image output image r s (intensity levels)

where r is the variable that represents the gray level of an
image to be enhanced, s is the transformed value and T is
the transformation function. If the probability density
function (PDF) of r and s is represented by pr and ps
respectively, Ps is calculated by applying a simple
formula.
ps(s)=pr(r)
The goal of histogram equalization is to attain an output
image with a uniform PDF. It magnifies the dynamic
range of intensity values while flattening the histogram.

E. High-Boost Filter
High-boost filter is a simple sharpening operator in
image processing. It is often desirable to accentuate high
frequency components that represent the image details
without having to eliminate the low frequency
components (such as sharpening). The high-boost filter is
used to enhance this high frequency component [9]. It
composes of an edge detection filter (laplacian filter). The
amplification is achieved via subtracting a smoothed
version of the image from the original one. When k > 1,
the process is referred to as high-boost filtering.
F. Smoothing Spatial Filter
The output of a linear smoothing spatial filter is simply
average of the neighbourhood pixels defined by the filter
mask. Also called averaging filters or low pass filters
these filters reduce sharp transition in intensities of gray
level, so as to work as a noise reduction application. This
provides blurring effect to the image. They help in
diminishing irrelevant details and obtain a gross
representation of objects of interest [10].
Mean filter, or average filter is windowed filter that
smoothes image. Here we simply replace each pixel value
in an image with the mean of its neighbours, including
itself. It can be thought of as a convolution filter. It is
based around a kernel, often a 33 square kernel is used,
as shown in Figure below, larger kernels provides more
severe smoothing.
III. PROPOSED TECHNIQUE
A new technique for enhancing the bio-medical images
using spacial domain is presented which is a simple,
correct and effective procedure of image enhancement.
The block diagram of the proposed technique is shown in
Fig 1. The very first step of the process is to sharpen the
original image using sharpening spacial filters like

laplacian filter. Sharpening spacial filters helps in

highlighting edges and removing blurrness from the
image [11]. These filters are basically based on spatial
differentiation. After that, subtracting the laplacian image
from the original image will make sharpened image edges
and fine details more obvious.
In parallel with the first step, histogram equalization of
the original image is done so that the gray level values of
the image will become uniformly distributed. Histogram
equalization will provide more pleasing results visually.
After this, edge detection of the equalized image is done
with the help of sobel filter to find the unmarked edges. In
the next step, the image is operated by smoothing filter
such as averaging filter on the result of sobel image. In
averaging filter a matrix of n*n is taken which will simply
take the average of all the neighboring pixels around the
centre. These smoothing filters are basically used for
removing the noises from the image. Now, the result of
averaging filter and the sharpened images are multiplied.
Multiplication helps in setting up contrast for the image.
Then, another point operation that is addition of the result
of multiplication with the original image is done which is
done for controlling the brightness of the image.
After the point operation, a non-linear transformation
technique is used. Various inputs for power-law are taken
giving us different results. A correction method is also
there for the power-law known as gamma correction
method which will display the image correctly on the
screen. Gamma correction is very crucial for the
commercial purpose of digital images [12-13]. Now, the
last method defined in the technique is high-boost
filtering which will remove the low frequency
components allowing only high frequency components of
the image to pass through which provides only detailed
and sharpened components. After the application of this
technique; contrast, brightness and details of the image
are ameliorated and an enhanced image is obtained as an
output.

Fig 1: Block Diagram of the Proposed Technique

TABLE I
COMPARISON OF ENTROPY FOR DIFFERENT VALUES
S.No.

Gamma Value ()

Entropy

0.8

5.4701

0.9

5.3344

1.0

5.1740

1.1

5.0078

IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

1.1

5.0078

A technique of bio-medical image enhancement is

proposed in which spatial domain is combined with nonlinear transform and histogram equalization. This
technique has shown tremendous results for image
enhancement. For this purpose x-ray image has been used.
Fig 2 represents the stepwise implementation of the
proposed technique. Figure (a) is the original image.
Figure (b) shows the result when laplacian operator is
applied on the original image for edge enhancement.
Figure (c) shows the sharpened image obtained after
subtracting the laplacian image from the original image.
Figure (d) shows the application of histogram equalization
on the original image. Figure (e) is the implementation of
sobel filter for edge detection on the histogram equalized
image. Further, figure (f) represents the obtained image
from the logical operators applied like add, multiply.
Then, power law transformation is applied on the image
as shown in figure (g). Comparisons between different
values are shown in TABLE I but best suitable value of
is 0.8 as it yields maximum entropy. High-boost filter is
then applied which gives us the enhanced image as figure
(h).
After visualization of the figure (a) and (h), it can be
inferred that the proposed technique gives better result for
image enhancement.
Entropy provides the measure for the proposed image
enhancement technique. Table I shows the comparison of
entropies according to the different values. Entropy
obtained from value 0.8 is higher than the other values.
Hence, an enhanced image can be obtained by comparing
the entropy values.
V. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE ASPECT

Fig 2: Output of the proposed technique

This technique ameliorates the visual quality of images

that contain dark patches and shadows because of a limit
in the dynamic range like x-ray images. Experimental
results shown above suggest that the proposed technique

surpasses the commonly used enhancement techniques

like the histogram equalization qualitatively and
quantitatively.
In future, use of orthogonal or logarithmic transform
can be used with the proposed technique to further
enhance the image.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research is made possible through the help and
support from everyone, including parents, teachers and
friends. We would like to dedicate our acknowledgment
of gratitude towards all our teachers for their continuous
support and encouragement. Finally, we sincerely thank
our parents, family, friends who provided their advice and
financial support. This paper would not have been
possible without them.
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