Smoothing cephalographs using modified anisotropic diffusion filter

For the automatic detection of cephalometric landmarks in digital skull X-ray, enhancement is required for selective emphasis and suppression of information in the image with the aim of increasing the image's usefulness, image smoothing filters are used for noise removal and blurring for removing small details which clutter the main shape. This image smoothing leads to better edge detction for recognizing the landmarks on the edges. This paper proposes a new smoothing technique based on anisotropic diffusion which gives improved results.