Morphological enhancement of coronary angiograms using decomposition of skipped structuring element

To improve the computational speed of the rolling ball image enhancement algorithm, the authors introduce a new skipped structuring element (SE) and present an algorithm to decompose this and other kinds of skipped structuring elements. To evaluate the performance of the enhancement algorithm with different SEs, they designed a set of synthetic test images which mimic the real angiogram blood vessels and background. A performance index for image quality measurement of the enhanced coronary angiograms has been applied to all test images. The experimental results led to the conclusion that the new approach, which preserves most of the enhancement capability of using the complete structuring element, improves the computational speed by at least one order of magnitude