A Three-Step Approach with Adaptive Additive Magnitude Selection for the Sharpening of Images

Aimed to find the additive magnitude automatically and adaptively, we propose a three-step and model-based approach for the sharpening of images in this paper. In the first pass, a Grey prediction model is applied to find a global maximal additive magnitude so that the condition of oversharpening in images to be sharpened can be avoided. During the second pass, edge pixels are picked out with our previously proposed edge detection mechanism. In this pass, a low-pass filter is also applied so that isolated pixels will not be regarded as around an edge. In the final pass, those pixels detected as around an edge are adjusted adaptively based on the local statistics, and those nonedge pixels are kept unaltered. Extensive experiments on natural images as well as medical images with subjective and objective evaluations will be given to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed approach.