CONTRAST ENHANCEMENT OF MEDICAL IMAGES USING MULTISCALE EDGE REPRESENTATION

Experience suggests the existence of a connection between the contrast of a gray-scale image and the gradient magnitude of intensity edges i n the neighborhood where the contrast is measured. This observation mo tivates the development of edge-based contrast enhancement techniques. We present a simple and effective method for image contrast enhanceme nt based on the multiscale edge representation of images. The contrast of an image can be enhanced simply by stretching or upscaling the mul tiscale gradient maxima of the image. This method offers flexibility t o selectively enhance features of different sizes and ability to contr ol noise magnification. We present some experimental results from enha ncing medical images and discuss the advantages of this wavelet approa ch over other edge-based techniques.