Abstract: Principle objective of Image enhancement is to process an image so that result is more suitable than original image for specific application. Digital image enhancement techniques provide a multitude of choices for improving the visual quality of images. A frequency domain smoothing sharpening technique is proposed and its impact is assessed to beneficially enhance mammogram images. This technique aims to gain the advantages of enhance and sharpening process that aims to highlight sudden changes in the image intensity, it is usually applied to remove random noise from digital images. The already developed technique also eliminates the drawbacks of each of the two sharpening and smoothing techniques resulting from their individual application in image processing field. The selection of parameters is almost invariant of the type of background tissues and severity of the abnormality, giving significantly improved results even for denser mammographic images. The proposed technique is tested breast X-ray mammograms. The simulated results show that the high potential to advantageously enhance the image contrast hence giving extra aid to radiologists to detect and classify mammograms of breast cancer.

Keywords: Fourier transform, Gabor filter, Image processing, Image enhancement, Mammogram, Segmentation.