Image Enhancement Using Multi-scale Gradients of the Wavelet Transform

In this paper, we propose new unsharp masking technique based on the multiscale gradient planes. The unsharp masking technique is implemented as a high-pass filter and improves the sharpness of degraded images. However, the conventional unsharp masking enhances the noise component simultaneously. To reduce the noise influence, we introduce the edge information from the difference of the gradient values between two consecutive scales of the multiscale gradient. The multiscale gradient indicates the presence of image edges as the ratio between the gradients between two different scales by its multiscale nature. The noise reduction of the proposed method does not depend on the variance of images and noises. In experiment, we demonstrate enhancement results for blurred noisy images and compare with the conventional cubic unsharp masking technique.