IT-based evaluation and automatic improvement of the quality of intraoral radiographs

The quality of intraoral radiographs made in dental practices is too often not adequate for diagnostic purposes. This necessitates standardized measures for the quality of intraoral radiographs and controlled techniques for automatic image improvement. For the evaluation of the quality of digitized intraoral radiographs the authors have defined two parameters which enable the measurement of radiographic image quality with regard to contrast and gray value distribution. A two-dimensional feature space based on these parameters is used for separation of images with 'good diagnostic quality' from images with 'insufficient diagnostic quality'. Specific image improvement techniques based on piecewise linear gray scale transformation allow the automatic improvement of over- and under-exposed radiographs as well as the automatic improvement of suspected pathological regions of interest.