Image Enhancement Using Elastic Manifolds

Image denoising and enhancement problems have many physical analogues that highlight new approaches to novel solutions. One such solution, based on viewing the image as elastic sheet, is presented. A processing scheme for grayscale images is outlined and further considered in the context of color images. Preliminary analysis and simulations on noisy images indicate that multidimensional manifold representation of combined space-color information incorporates the advantages of separate color channel representations. Experimental analysis reveals elastic sheet method to be a powerful and robust denoising tool, which preserves most meaningful details.