Suitability of Gabor filter for denoising and contrast enhancement of digital mammograms

Breast cancer is the major cause for higher mortality rate in women. One in every eight women is diagnosed with breast cancer. Abnormal growth of tissues in the breast region causes cancer. Detection of breast cancer in the early stage increases the recovery rate. Detecting the breast lesions is done by filming the region by passing low dose x-ray on the specified region. This film is known as mammogram. Detecting the lesion from mammograms is a complex process which involves imaging analysis. Mammogram images are low contrast and may contain noise due to the sensitivity of scanning machine and motion artifacts. To denoise and enhance the mammogram, filtering methods can be applied. In this paper a Gabor filter bank based Denoising algorithm has been proposed.