Title: An UM-based silhouette-crease edge enhancement for noisy images

Authors: Shwu-Huey Yen; Tai-Kuang Li; Chun-Hui Wang

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Tamkang University, 151 Ying-chuan Road, Tamsui, New Taipei City 25137, Taiwan ' Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Tamkang University, 151 Ying-chuan Road, Tamsui, New Taipei City 25137, Taiwan ' Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Tamkang University, 151 Ying-chuan Road, Tamsui, New Taipei City 25137, Taiwan

Abstract: This paper presents an improved unsharp masking (UM) technique that enhances the quality and suppresses noises for the images acquired from a noisy environment such as taken during night time. Our approach employs noise smoothing and the idea that important edges should be enhanced more than minor edges. Edges are classified as silhouette and crease edges (major and minor edges) according to their lengths. An adaptive weighting method is used to enhance the edges. In this way, the major edges (silhouette) are sharpened more than minor edges (crease). The proposed method is examined on night images as well as noisy images. It is also compared to existing UM-based methods with satisfying results.

Keywords: unsharp masking; UM; silhouette edges; crease edges; detail variance; background variance; UM-based edge enhancement; noisy images; image processing; noise suppression; noise smoothing; night images.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2015.070989

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2015 Vol.10 No.4, pp.327 - 335

Received: 10 Dec 2011
Accepted: 08 May 2012
Published online: 05 Aug 2015 *

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