A wavelet-based mammographic image denoising and enhancement with homomorphic filtering

Breast cancer continues to be a significant public health problem in the world. The diagnosing mammography method is the most effective technology for early detection of the breast cancer. However, in some cases, it is difficult for radiologists to detect the typical diagnostic signs, such as masses and microcalcifications on the mammograms. This paper describes a new method for mammographic image enhancement and denoising based on wavelet transform and homomorphic filtering. The mammograms are acquired from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Akdeniz and the University of Istanbul in Turkey. Firstly wavelet transform of the mammograms is obtained and the approximation coefficients are filtered by homomorphic filter. Then the detail coefficients of the wavelet associated with noise and edges are modeled by Gaussian and Laplacian variables, respectively. The considered coefficients are compressed and enhanced using these variables with a shrinkage function. Finally using a proposed adaptive thresholding the fine details of the mammograms are retained and the noise is suppressed. The preliminary results of our work indicate that this method provides much more visibility for the suspicious regions.