An Improved Approach for Contrast Enhancement of Spinal Cord Images based on Multiscale Retinex Algorithm

This paper presents a new approach for contrast enhancement of spinal cord medical images based on multirate scheme incorporated into multiscale retinex algorithm. The proposed work here uses HSV color space, since HSV color space separates color details from intensity. The enhancement of medical image is achieved by down sampling the original image into five versions, namely, tiny, small, medium, fine, and normal scale. This is due to the fact that the each versions of the image when independently enhanced and reconstructed results in enormous improvement in the visual quality. Further, the contrast stretching and MultiScale Retinex (MSR) techniques are exploited in order to enhance each of the scaled version of the image. Finally, the enhanced image is obtained by combining each of these scales in an efficient way to obtain the composite enhanced image. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm is validated by using a wavelet energy metric in the wavelet domain. Reconstructed image using proposed method highlights the details (edges and tissues), reduces image noise (Gaussian and Speckle) and improves the overall contrast. The proposed algorithm also enhances sharp edges of the tissue surrounding the spinal cord regions which is useful for diagnosis of spinal cord lesions. Elaborated experiments are conducted on several medical images and results presented show that the enhanced medical pictures are of good quality and is found to be better compared with other researcher methods.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, International Journal of Imaging and Robotics. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1406.571

Retinex filtering of foggy images: generation of a bulk set with selection and ranking

In this paper we are proposing the use of GIMP Retinex, a filter of the GNU Image Manipulation Program, for enhancing foggy images. This filter involves adjusting four different parameters to find the output image which has to be preferred according to some specific purposes. Aiming to obtain a processing, which is able of choosing automatically the best image from a given set, we are proposing a method for the generation a bulk set of GIMP Retinex filtered images and a preliminary approach for selecting and ranking them.Comment: Keywords: GIMP Retinex, GIMP, Image processing, Bulk generation of images, Bulk manipulation of image