Computed Tomography Image Enhancement Using Cuckoo Search: A Log Transform Based Approach

Medical image enhancement is an essential process for superior disease diagnosis as well as for detection of pathological lesion accurately. Computed Tomography (CT) is considered a vital medical imaging modality to evaluate numerous diseases such as tumors and vascular lesions. However, speckle noise corrupts the CT images and makes the clinical data analysis ambiguous. Therefore, for accurate diagnosis, medical image enhancement is a must for noise removal and sharp/clear images. In this work, a medical image enhancement algorithm has been proposed using log transform in an optimization framework. In order to achieve optimization, a well-known meta-heuristic algorithm, namely: Cuckoo search (CS) algorithm is used to determine the optimal parameter settings for log transform. The performance of the proposed technique is studied on a low contrast CT image dataset. Besides this, the results clearly show that the CS based approach has superior convergence and fitness values compared to PSO as the CS converge faster that proves the efficacy of the CS based technique. Finally, Image Quality Analysis (IQA) justifies the robustness of the proposed enhancement technique.