Analysis of image quality based on dentists' perception cognitive analysis and statistical measurements of intra-oral dental radiographs

Image quality plays an important role in assisting dentists' diagnosis ability. However, noise that come from the nature of image acquisition processes degrades image quality in radiographs. Advancement in image processing has leads many researches toward the enhancement of medical images for more accurate medical expert interpretation. This paper discusses the implementation of a spatial domain enhancement based method to enhance the digital dental radiographs. The technique applied the differential diagnosis findings of Intra-oral dental X-ray images for pre and post processing with sharp contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization (SCLAHE). The diagnosis capability is assessed according to the dentists' perception of image quality that contributes to the detection of various pathologies. Thirty intra-oral digital dental radiographs were collected from Faculty of Dentistry UiTM Shah Alam. These images were processed with SCLAHE to produce a total of 90 images observation. The evaluation on the images is done in predefined time of two hours by three dentists. The evaluations were done using printed questionnaires together with the images softcopy viewed on a computer screen. The statistical methods used are contrast enhancement index (CII), Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and cognitive analysis of dentists' perception. SCLAHE shows potential to improve the quality of the original images.