An Image Enhancement Method for Noisy Image

Chuanwei Sun 1,2 1 School of Information Science and Technology East China Normal University 2 School of Information Science and Engineering University of Jinan Shanghai , China No.500 Dongchuan Road, Shanghai, China 200241 chuanweisun@yahoo.com.cn Hong Liu School of Information Science and Technology East China Normal University Shanghai , China No.500 Dongchuan Road, Shanghai, China 200241 liuhong0520163@163.com Jingao Liu School of Information Science and Technology East China Normal University Shanghai , China No.500 Dongchuan Road, Shanghai, China 200241 jgl0000@126.com

Abstract
In this paper, image enhancement for noisy image has been studied. A simple approach to enhancement of noisy image data is presented. The proposed method is based on a two steps system that adopts predenosing step in order to prevent the noise increase during the sharpening of the image. The proposed method has better performance than available methods in the enhancement of noisy images. Simulation results show that this method can effectively improve the effect of sharpening the noisy image.

1. Introduction
In image acquisition and transmission, due to the impact of other objective factors such as environmental conditions, system noise, relative motion, and so on, there will produce a difference between the original image and the resulting image. We must take some measures for its improvement so as to obtain the real image information for special purpose. A large number of algorithms for image noise removing have been proposed [1][7]. Digital image enhancement and analysis have played, and will continue to play, an important role in scientific, industrial, and military application [6].The principal objective of enhancement is to process an image so that the result is more suitable than the original image for a specific application [1]. The enhancement of noisy data,

however, is a very critical process because the sharpening operation can significantly increase the noise [8]. Traditional image enhancement methods include spatial domain methods and frequency domain methods. The classic linear unsharp masking is implemented by passing a low-contrast image through a linear two-dimensional high-pass filter and then adding a fraction of its output to the original [9]. The method enlarges the noise in the process of enhancement. In this paper, a simple method for the enhancement of noisy image is presented. The proposed approach consists of two steps: pre-denoising step and enhancement step. In Section 2, image noise and denoising methods is described, the method of the simple image enhancement technique is presented in Section 3. In Section 4, the experimental discussion is presented, and the conclusions are given.

2. Image Noise and De-noising Methods

The following section describes image noise and de-noising methods.

2.1. Image Noise

Image noise styles may be divided differently according to different criterion. The criterions include: the causes of image noises generation, the shape of the noise amplitude distribution over time, noise spectrum shape and the relationship between noise and signal,

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and so on. For example, image noise can be divided into additive noise and multiplicative noise according to the relationship between noise and signal. There are many types of image noise. Such as additive noise, multiplicative noise, salt and pepper noise, Gaussian noise. In the research processing of digital image, we can add Gaussian noise, localvar noise, Poisson noise, salt and pepper noise and speckle noise to the original image in the Matlab platform. The Gaussian noise is Gaussian white noise with constant mean and variance. The localvar noise is zero-mean Gaussian white noise with an intensity-dependent variance. Probably the most frequently occurring noise is additive Gaussian noise[6]. The PDF of a Gaussian random variable, z , is given by 1 (1) p( z) e
 ( z  P )2 2V 2

corrupted by salt & pepper noise with, (c) Image corrupted by Gaussian noise Figure 1(a) shows the original image. To visualize the impact of different types of noise on the quality of original image, figure. 1(b) and (c) show the corrupted image by salt & pepper noise with noise density 0.1 and Gaussian noise with mean 0 and variance 0.02, respectively.

2.2. De-noising Methods

For different types of noise, we can choose different methods of de-noising based on the noise characteristics. In general, image noise reduction methods can be carried out in both space domain and in frequency domain. The average method can be used to reduce noise in spatial domain, while various forms of low-pass filtering methods can be used to reduce noise in the frequency domain. This section describes the typical methods of noise removing, including both spatial domain method and frequency domain method. Median filtering, as a nonlinear operation, is a typical spatial method of reducing salt and pepper noise in an image. A median filter is more effective than convolution when the goal is to simultaneously reduce noise and preserve edges [10]. Image smoothing is realized in the frequency domain by reducing a specified range of high frequency components. The low-pass filter can remove high frequency noise of an image in the frequency domain. Commonly used frequency domain low-pass filter includes: Ideal Lowpass Filter (ILPF), Gaussian Lowpass Filter (BLPF), Butterworth Lowpass filter (BLPF). The transfer function of Gaussian lowpass filters in two dimensions is given by H (u , v) exp(  D 2 (u , v) 2 V 2 ) (3) the origin of the Fourier transform V is a measure of the spread of the Gaussian curve. Figure 2 ashows the result of filtering the noise image shown in Figure 1(b) with a median filter of size 33, and Figure 2 bshows the result of filtering the noise image shown in Figure 1(c) with a lowpass Gaussian filter of sig 40. Where

Where z represents gray level, P is the mean of average value of z , and V is its standard deviation[1]. Salt and pepper noise refers to a wide variety of processes that result in the same basic image degradation: only a few pixels are noisy, but they are very noisy [6]. The PDF of Salt and pepper noise is given by
p( z ) Pa Pb 0 for z for z a b

2SV

(2)

otherwise

If b>a, gray-level b will appear as a light dot in the image. Conversely, level a will appear like a dark dot [1].

D(u , v) is the distance from any point to

(a)

(b)

(c)

Figure 1. the original image and the polluted image(a) Original lena image,(b) Image

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(a)

(b)

Figure 2. (a) De-noising image of Figure 1 (b), and (b) De-noising image of Figure 1 (c)

Figure 3. Enhanced image using the unsharp filter for (a) Figure 1 (b), (b) 2 (a), (c) Figure 1 (c) and (d) Figure 2 (b)

3. Image Enhancement
The Image enhancement is a process of image preprocessing. The principal objective of enhancement is to process an image so that the result is more suitable than the original image for a specific application [1]. Image enhancement methods can be divided into two categories: spatial domain methods and frequency domain methods. In general, single image enhancement method can not meet the actual requirements in digital image processing. A method of image enhancement to achieve a better visual effect for image enhancement was proposed. We can perform de-noising of the image first and then sharpen the image.

3.2. Frequency Domain Image Enhancement

The Frequency domain image enhancement methods consist of smoothing frequency domain filters, sharpening frequency domain filters and homomorphic filtering. H (u, v) Given the transfer function h p of highpass H (u , v ) filter and the corresponding transfer function lp of lowpass filter, we can get the relation[1] (4) High-frequency emphasis filter has the transfer function (5) Where a is the offset and b is the multiplier. In this section we will use high-frequency emphasis filter to enhance the noisy image and de-noising image firstly, and then using histogram equalization to further enhance the image. Experiment 2, we enhance the image in Figure 1(c) and Figure 2(b) using the highpass filters. Figure 4 shows the enhanced image of Figure 1(c) and Figure 2(b). The results show that the enhanced pre-denoising images have higher contrast than the noisy ones and are smoother than that of the noisy ones.

H hp (u , v) 1  H lp (u , v)

H hfe (u, v)

a  bH lp (u , v)

3.1. Spatial Domain Image Enhancement

Spatial domain Image enhancement methods includes: gray level transformations, histogram processing, arithmetic/logic operations, basic spatial filters, smoothing spatial filters and sharpening spatial filters. In this section we will discuss spatial sharpening method application in the enhancement of noisy image. We will use linear unsharp masking filter to enhance the noisy image and the de-noising image. The unsharp masking filter has the effect of making edges and fine detail in the image more crisp [10]. Experiment 1, we enhance the image in figure 1(b) and figure 2(a) using the unsharp filter. Figure 3 shows the enhanced image of Figure 1(b) and Figure 2(a). The results show that the enhanced images of pre-denoising have better performance then that of the noisy ones.

(a)

(b)

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

Figure 4. Enhanced image using the highpass filter for (a) Figure 1 (b), (b) Figure 2 (a), (c) Figure 1 (c) and (d) Figure 2 (b)

4. Discussion and Conclusion

(c) (d)

The Image enhancement method for noisy image is proposed and implemented in section 3. The image

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named Lena with a size of 256256 have been corrupted by two different types of noise model, including Gaussian noise and salt & pepper noise. The pre-denoising method of Figure 2 ais a median filter in the spatial domain, and the pre-denoising method of Figure 2 b is a low-pass filter in the time domain. The pre-denoising effect of median filter on salt & pepper noise is better than low-pass filter on Gaussian noise. Firstly, the noisy image was enhanced using the unsharp filter in the spatial domain, and the results is shown in Figure 3. Figure 3(a) is the enhanced image of lena corrupted by salt & pepper noise and Figure 3(b) is the enhanced de-noised image shown in Figure 2 b . Figure 3(c) is the enhanced image of lena by Gaussian noise and Figure 3(d) is the enhanced denoised image, which is shown in Figure 2 b. We can see that the enhanced image of denoised image has good visual effect than the enhanced image of noisy image. Secondly, the noisy image was enhanced in the frequency domain. Figure 4(a) and (c) is the result of noisy image Figure 1(b) and (c) respectively. Figure 4(b) and (d) is the result of noisy image Figure 2(a) and (b) respectively. The result shows that the sharpening effect of the de-noising image is better than the noisy one. The experimental results show that the method proposed in the paper is effective and robust to common digital image signal processing operations. Especially, it receives high visual effect under signal enhancement operations, such as sharpening, edge enhancement, histogram equalization, and so on. The key to the method is to classify the noise type and select the correct de-noising and enhancement approaches according to different purpose. By using the method proposed in the paper, we can get better image visual effect of the noisy image. And the method can help us get special characteristic of an image which is useful to us.

Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Ministry and City Cooperation Project of Science and Technology Supporting Plan in Shanghai Science and Technology Committee (Grant No.10DZ0581000).

References
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