Contrast Enhancement for Segmentation of Hippocampus on Brain MR Images

Abstract

An image segmentation result depends on pre-processing steps such as contrast enhancement, edge detection, and smooth filtering etc. Especially medical images are low contrast and contain some noises. Therefore, the contrast enhancement and noise removal techniques are required in the pre-processing. In this study, we present an extension by a novel histogram equalization in which both local and global contrast is enhanced using neighborhood metrics. When checking neighborhood information, filters can simultaneously improve image quality. Most important is that original image information can be used for both global brightness preserving and local contrast enhancement, and image quality improvement filtering. Our experiments confirmed that the proposed method is more effective than other similar techniques reported previously.