Sensors (Aug 2021)

An Advanced Noise Reduction and Edge Enhancement Algorithm

  • Shih-Chia Huang,
  • Quoc-Viet Hoang,
  • Trung-Hieu Le,
  • Yan-Tsung Peng,
  • Ching-Chun Huang,
  • Cheng Zhang,
  • Benjamin C. M. Fung,
  • Kai-Han Cheng,
  • Sha-Wo Huang

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/s21165391
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 21, no. 16
p. 5391

Abstract

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Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) image sensors can cause noise in images collected or transmitted in unfavorable environments, especially low-illumination scenarios. Numerous approaches have been developed to solve the problem of image noise removal. However, producing natural and high-quality denoised images remains a crucial challenge. To meet this challenge, we introduce a novel approach for image denoising with the following three main contributions. First, we devise a deep image prior-based module that can produce a noise-reduced image as well as a contrast-enhanced denoised one from a noisy input image. Second, the produced images are passed through a proposed image fusion (IF) module based on Laplacian pyramid decomposition to combine them and prevent noise amplification and color shift. Finally, we introduce a progressive refinement (PR) module, which adopts the summed-area tables to take advantage of spatially correlated information for edge and image quality enhancement. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate the efficiency, superiority, and robustness of our proposed method.

Keywords