Enhancement of aerial images using threshold decomposition adaptive morphological filter

One of the most common degradations in aerial images is their poor contrast and low resolution quality. This suggests the use of contrast enhancement methods as an attempt to modify the intensity distribution of the image. In this paper, a new edge detected morphological filter is proposed to sharpen aerial images. This is done by detecting the positions of the edges and then applying a class of morphological filtering. Motivated by the success of threshold decomposition, gradient-based operators are used to detect the locations of the edges. A morphological filter is used to sharpen these detected edges. Experimental results demonstrate that the detected edge deblurring filter improved the visibility and perceptibility of various embedded structures in aerial images. Moreover, the performance of the proposed filter is superior to that of other sharpener-type filters.