Image detail enhancement with spatially guided filters

• DOI: 10.1016/j.sigpro.2015.02.017
• Publication Date: 2015-03-02T02:05:11Z
• Authors: Shijie Hao; Daru Pan; Yanrong Guo; Richang Hong; Meng Wang
• Keywords: Edge enhancement; Spatial filter

In recent years, enhancing image details without introducing artifacts has been attracting much attention in image processing community. Various image filtering methods have been proposed to achieve this goal. However, existing methods usually treat all pixels equally during the filtering process without considering the relationship between filtering strengths and image contents. In this paper, we address this issue by spatially distributing the filtering strengths with simple low-level features. First, to determine the pixel-wise filtering strength, we construct a spatially guided map, which exploits the spatial influence of image details based on the edge response of an image. Then, we further integrate this guided map into two state-of-the-art image filters and apply the improved filters to the task of image detail enhancement. Experiments demonstrate that our results generate better content-specific visual effects and introduce much less artifacts. We construct a spatially guided map exploiting spatial influences of edge features.We improve two state-of-the-art filters by integrating our spatially guided map.Better filtering results are obtained with more naturalness and less artifacts.