Region Based Adaptive Contrast Enhancement of Medical Ultrasound Images

Since the dawn of computerization of medical science, ultrasonic imaging has been an active research area and impacts important applications in the medical field. Ultrasound images have low contrast due to various artifacts. In most of the existing region growing contrast enhancement techniques, selection of seed point and threshold value is a challenging task. In this paper, an adaptive region based contrast enhancement technique based on the region growing segmentation concept is proposed. In the proposed work, automatic selection of seed point from the region of interest of an image is done followed by computation of threshold value to segment foreground and background pixels where the prime focus is to enhance foreground areas of an image. Qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the results of the proposed technique has been performed and results are very promising when compared with state-of-the-art techniques.