Contrast Enhancement of the Mammographic Image Using Retinex with CLAHE methods

Abstract

Recently digital mammography is most widely used technology for early detection of breast cancer. The main diagnosing elements such as lesion or masses in digital mammograms are with law contrast. The purpose of this paper is to enhance the mammogram images by increasing its contrast. Different enhancement method are used for this purpose such as histogram equalization (HE), Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE), Morphological, and Retinex. The Retinex method also implement by combining it with HE once, and with CLAHE to improve its performance. The experimental results show that using Retinex with CLAHE can produce an image with enhancement in contrast better than using it with HE method and better than other methods mentioned above.