This paper proposes a statistical model of enhancement field (SMEF) aiming to effectively capture the statistics of high-dimensional enhancement fields which can then be leveraged to regularize the enhancement of portable chest radiograph images captured in the intensive care unit (ICU). Wavelet-packet transformation (WPT) of enhancement fields coupled with PCA in each wavelet band are used to more accurately estimate a prior pdf of high-dimensional enhancement fields from limited number of training samples. As a result, more consistent enhancement results can be obtained. In experiments, we first demonstrate the ability of SMEF to improve the visibility of CR ICU images and then demonstrate the ability of SMEF to provide more consistent image enhancement solution, via comparing the localized image enhancement algorithm, CLAHE, with its SMEF-constrained version. The proposed SMEF framework can potentially incorporate various image enhancement algorithms to improve consistency and stability.

Date Published: 13 March 2013
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 8669, Medical Imaging 2013: Image Processing, 86693J (13 March 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2006689

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8669:
Medical Imaging 2013: Image Processing
Sebastien Ourselin; David R. Haynor, Editor(s)