Integration of fuzzy logic and structure tensor towards mammogram contrast enhancement

In this paper, we describe a combined approach with fuzzy logic and structure tensor towards improved enhancement of possible MCs (microcalcifications) in digital mammograms. The proposed contrast enhancement algorithm has two operational components. One is structure tensor operator and the other is fuzzy enhancement operator, both of which are arranged in parallel to process the input digital mammograms. While the structure tensor operator processes the digital mammograms and produces a corresponding eigen-image to highlight the region-of-interests, the fuzzy enhancement operator fuzzifies the mammogram via the maximum fuzzy entropy principle in fuzzy domain. As a result, the local fuzzy contrast can be extracted and modified adaptively in accordance with the information provided by the eigen-image, and those non-MCs regions are suppressed by being taken as noise. After that, the mammogram is transformed back to the pixel domain and the enhanced mammogram is constructed. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed algorithm outperforms the existing benchmark in terms of cost figures across the whole range of true positive fractions (TPF).