Enhancement of low quality blood smear image using contrast and edge corrections

A blood smear is one of the medical images that widely used to disease diagnosis. A low-quality of smear that produced by poor microscopy specification complicates the reading of the feature. The characteristics are blurred, diminished true colour of object, unclear boundary and low contrast between object and background. In this study, we propose new enhancement strategy through edge correction based on dual contrast enhancement to improve the readability of the features in the low quality of blood smear image. Dual contrast enhancement utilises the integration of contrast correction globally and locally, while edge correction uses unsharp masking filtering to improve the object edge. The experiments are performed on three diseases images. The results show that the proposed method achieves best entropy and pretty good on MSE and PSNR, so it can produce images contained more information than the other methods and had a good effectiveness.