Sharpness Improvement for Medical Images Using a New Nimble Filter

Abstract

It is known that various medical devices introduce blur to recorded images due to many factual yet inevitable limitations. Thus, it is highly desirable to provide an efficient solution for such prevalent problem. In this article, a new sharpening filter is proposed to improve the edges and fine details of medical images. In the proposed filter, the sharpening process is achieved by deducting specific spatial information which is determined expeditiously from the original image itself with the existence of a special tuning weight that controls the amount of the produced sharpness. The aforesaid procedure helped to increase the acutance of edges and improve the overall sharpness significantly in the processed images. The proposed filter was evaluated using two advanced image quality assessment metrics and was compared with four well-known image sharpening techniques. Intensive experiments and comparisons using different 2D and 3D real-degraded medical images revealed that the proposed filter has better performance and properties than several existing techniques, and is more suitable for sharpening medical images.