Dental contour extraction using window empirical mode decomposition

Medical images with fuzzy and non-uniform characteristics make it difficult to accurately extract target contour, aiming at this problem, an improved method is proposed to detect the dental contour of a single-teeth X-ray film segmented from a bitewing radiograph. Three necessary steps are to be performed, the first of which is to enhance the contrast of the medical X-ray image based on human visual properties after denoised with morphology open-close filter, the second to get the first intrinsic mode function from the empirical mode decomposition with a square-adaptive sliding window of the enhanced image, and the third to detect and threshold the edge of the intrinsic mode function. Some results of experiments have confirmed the efficiency of our proposed method.