Enhancing digital cephalic radiography with mixture models and local gamma correction

We present a new algorithm, called the soft-tissue filter, that can make both soft and bone tissue clearly visible in digital cephalic radiographies under a wide range of exposures. It uses a mixture model made up of two Gaussian distributions and one inverted lognormal distribution to analyze the image histogram. The image is clustered in three parts: background, soft tissue, and bone using this model. Improvement in the visibility of both structures is achieved through a local transformation based on gamma correction, stretching, and saturation, which is applied using different parameters for bone and soft-tissue pixels. A processing time of 1 s for 5 Mpixel images allows the filter to operate in real time. Although the default value of the filter parameters is adequate for most images, real-time operation allows adjustment to recover under- and overexposed images or to obtain the best quality subjectively. The filter was extensively clinically tested: quantitative and qualitative results are reported here.