An improved image enhancement combining smoothing and sharpening

An effective method for contrast enhancement in an image was presented by Russo (2002), which was controlled by the trial-and-error tuning of one parameter. The same parameter was used for the entire image resulting in over blurring or sharpening, of features in the image. In this paper, we apply Russo´s algorithm on impulse noise and propose an efficient method for automatically obtaining the parameter value. Each pixel is adaptively assigned a different parameter value by evaluating the local features. Results of the proposed method are compared with those of Russo´s algorithm and of other methods for sharpening of image features. Experimental values indicate that the proposed method effectively tunes the operator yielding superior performance.