Image quality enhancement in digital panoramic radiograph

One of the most common positioning errors in panoramic radiography is palatoglossal air space above the apices of the root of maxillary teeth. It causes a radiolucency obscuring the apices of maxillary teeth. In the case of this positioning error, the imaging should be repeated. This causes the patient be exposed to radiation again. To avoid the repetition of exposing harmful X-rays to the patient, it is necessary to improve the panoramic images. This paper presents a new automatic panoramic image enhancement method to reduce the effect of this positioning error. Experimental results indicate that the enhanced panoramic images provide with adequate diagnostic information specially in maxilla sinusoid region. Hence, this technique dispenses the need for repetition of X-ray imaging

Provide a method for image preprocessing to improve the performance of JPEG 2000 in image compression

In JPEG 2000, two fundamental steps in image compression are wavelet transform and bit-planes encoding. In this method, first the wavelet transform of the image is provided, then, depending on the desired compression rate, the number of bit-planes of the wavelet coefficients are coded from most significant bit to the least significant bit. After achieving the desired compression rate, the other less significant bit-planes of wavelet coefficients are disregarded. In applying this method for low contrast image, wavelet coefficients of high frequency regions have small amounts, so these values are reflected in low bit-planes. These low bit-planes are removed during compression in encoder. Hence, JPEG 2000 has limited performance especially in low contrast image compression. In this paper, to improve the performance of JPEG 2000 a preprocessing is performed on the image to increase its contrast. With increasing image contrast, high frequency regions would have higher values in wavelet coefficients. As a result, information of these coefficients is largely preserved at the bit-planes encoding stage. The results show that the proposed preprocessing method improves the performance of JPEG 2000 in terms of compression rate and retrieved image quality. In more detail, for an equal retrieved image quality in the proposed method and JPEG 2000, the proposed method improves the compression rate of JPEG 2000 with an average of about 3.5%