Automatic hand bone segmentation is an essential subsystem for developing automatic fracture detection software for hands and wrists. In this paper, we propose a fuzzy stretching method in enhancing the intensity from X-ray images with trapezoid type membership function. In experiment, the proposed method successfully extracts the hand bone segmentation in 35 out of 40 cases (87.5%). Five unsuccessful cases might indicate another research topic in this problem domain that the removal of skins as noise with relatively small intensity contrast should be overcome with probably an intelligent pixel clustering method.

fuzzy stretching, bone fracture, X-ray, segmentation, trapezoid membership function.