Sharpening enhancement of ultrasound images using contourlet transform

The furry regions of ultrasound images are to be enhanced for good quality visual perception. This paper proposes a contourlet transform (CT) based sharpening technique (ST) for contrast enhancement in ultrasound (US) images. While sharpening, noise emphasize is the drawback of the classical ST methods. The proposed ST is operated on the multiscale, multidirectional CT decomposition of the underlying US image. The new ST not only sharpens the US image but also control the noise effect with tunable parameters. The results are compared with common unsharp masking and recently proposed nonlinear unsharp masking. The parameters like enhancement measure, structural similarity, and blind image quality measure evaluate the improved performances of the proposed technique. (C) 2013 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.