Mammogram enhancement using alpha weighted quadratic filter

Mammograms are widely used to detect breast cancer in women. The quality of the image may suffer from poor resolution or low contrast due to the limitations of the X-ray hardware systems. Image enhancement is a powerful tool to improve the visual quality of mammograms. This paper introduces a new powerful nonlinear filter called the alpha weighted quadratic filter for mammogram enhancement. The user has the flexibility to design the filter by selecting all of the parameters manually or using an existing quantitative measure to select the optimal enhancement parameters. Computer simulations show that excellent enhancement results can be obtained with no apriori knowledge of the mammogram contents. The filter can also be used for automatic segmentation.