The qualitative and quantitative evaluation of enhanced dental radiographs

Qualitative and quantitative evaluation is important in verifying the effectiveness in any enhancement techniques. The contrast enhancement of dental radiographs is common due to the nature of the intra-oral radiographs that sometimes suffer noises and lack of sufficient brightness. This work compares the qualitative evaluation of dentists to quantitative measurement of statistical values of contrast improvement index (CII), signal to noise ratio (SNR) and root mean square error (RMSE) on intra-oral dental x-ray images before and after processing with sharp adaptive histogram equalization (SAHE) and sharp contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization (SCLAHE). Results show that there are consistencies in the dentists´ evaluation and the statistical values obtained. As for the techniques it shows that SCLAHE have the positive effect on providing better information for dentists.