A Study on Weak Edge Detection of COVID-19’s CT Images Based on Histogram Equalization and Improved Canny Algorithm

Abstract

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a substantial threat to people’s lives and health due to its high infectivity and rapid spread. Computed tomography (CT) scan is one of the important auxiliary methods for the clinical diagnosis of COVID-19. However, CT image lesion edge is normally affected by pixels with uneven grayscale and isolated noise, which makes weak edge detection of the COVID-19 lesion more complicated. In order to solve this problem, an edge detection method is proposed, which combines the histogram equalization and the improved Canny algorithm. Specifically, the histogram equalization is applied to enhance image contrast. In the improved Canny algorithm, the median filter, instead of the Gaussian filter, is used to remove the isolated noise points. The $K$ -means algorithm is applied to separate the image background and edge. And the Canny algorithm is improved continuously by combining the mathematical morphology and the maximum between class variance method (OTSU). On selecting four types of lesion images from COVID-CT date set, MSE, MAE, SNR, and the running time are applied to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The average values of these evaluation indicators are 1.7322, 7.9010, 57.1241, and 5.4887, respectively. Compared with other three methods, these values indicate that the proposed method achieves better result. The experimental results prove that the proposed algorithm can effectively detect the weak edge of the lesion, which is helpful for the diagnosis of COVID-19.