An improved adaptive smoothing method

Abstract

An improvement of the Chen's method has been provided through the calculation of a more accurate H map. The H map is the pixel's contextual inhomogeneity value reflecting its proximity position with respect to an edge feature, and a more accurate H value leads to the more accurate smoothing speed for the pixel. While experiments on 5 real images show slight improvements in SNRs of our method over that of the Chen method, edge features preserving capability has been enhanced with low FARs (false alarm rates) for edge feature extracted from applying the Sobel filter to the image. Furthermore, parameter values have been determined through an exhaustive searching process resulting in the suggestions of h=0.4 and T=4 for practical applications where the original noise free image is not available and/or no viewer to visually make a selection of the final smoothed image as the output. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.