A new method to enhancing the quality of the images acquired with infrared camera is presented. Usually, thermal image filtering process relies on heat conductive component that propagates through tissue. An improved method for nonlinear filtering is presented in this article. A new component of the heat, the convection is associated heat that propagates through the tissues of living beings. From the physical point of view, this component is the result of blood flow through the tissue. The proposed algorithm uses both parts of the heat components and iteratively minimizes the noise that is added to the signal. During the iterative filtering process, the noise is more quickly minimized than other methods can do. Thermal contour shape is an important indicator for oncologists to diagnose superficial cancers such as breast, thyroid and skin. The proposed method has been tested on more patients and an example of an IR image filtering taken from a patient suffering from papillary carcinoma is shown at different iterations. The algorithm convergence speed and the contour shape are compared with the results obtained by using anisotropic filtering.
Image Enhancement/methods , Infrared Rays , Algorithms , Humans , Temperature
