Enhancement of Liver Ultrasound Images by Guided Image Filtering Technique

The liver ultrasound images suffer from low contrast and resolution, that results in deterioration of the quality of such kind of images as well as having less clarity of fine details i.e. edges or boundaries within the image as well. Therefore, visual interpretation of liver US images and its analysis for disease diagnosis becomes a challenging task for medical examiners or sonographers. So there is need of enhancement of these images so as to figure out the significant details of the image accurately. In this paper, an attempt is made for enhancing the liver US images by utilizing guided image filter (GIF) technique, in order to obtain images with suppressed noise & more highlighted fine detail that will help in liver ultrasound image analysis for any abnormality identification associated to it. The result outcome from the experimental analysis reveals that better enhancement of liver ultrasound images is achieved after applying weighted guided image filter (WGIF) technique. It is justified by the obtained image quality metrics, for GIF-technique PSNR value is (32.575-35.007) and SSIM value is (0.8269-0.8785), whereas for WGIF-technique, the range of PSNR value is (49.056-51.250) and SSIM value is (0.993-0.995) respectively.