An efficient and high quality medical CT image enhancement algorithm

Abstract Aiming at the process of medical diagnosis, many problems such as unclear images and low contrast are often caused by noise and interference in the process of medical image acquisition and transmission. This article proposes a new image enhancement method that combines the wavelet domain with the spatial domain. First, we input two identical images (Both of the identical images are original images.) in which the first image is enhanced by histogram equalization. Then, the two images are divided into four sub‐images by a two‐dimensional wavelet transform. The average of the low‐frequency coefficients of the low‐frequency sub‐images of the two images is taken as the low‐frequency coefficients of the final reconstruction. Second, aiming at the problem that the contrast may be too low, the fourth high‐frequency sub‐image is blurred (sharpened) twice. The fourth high‐frequency sub‐image after blurring is denoised by median filtering. Finally, the four sub‐images are fused to obtain the enhanced image. The experimental results show that the peak signal‐to‐noise ratio, structural similarity, and processing time of the proposed algorithm are better than those of other contrast algorithms, especially the processing time. These objective indicators show that the proposed algorithm can not only effectively suppress noise but also significantly enhance the contrast. Subjectively, compared with other algorithms, the proposed algorithm achieves a better visual effect and greatly reduces the processing time.