UNIT III

IMAGE ENHANCEMENT AND RESTORATION

 Spatial domain method – point operation – Histogram modeling

 Spatial operations – directional smoothening,
 median filtering, image sharpening, masking, edge crispening, interpolation
 Transform operation
 linear filtering, root filtering
 Homomorphic filtering
 Degradation model – diagonalization – Constrained and Unconstrained
restoration
 Inverse filtering – Wiener filter
 Generalised inverse, SVD and iterative methods.
IMAGE ENHANCEMENT

 Improving the interpretability or perception of information in images for human

viewers
 The objective of enhancement technique is to process an image so that the result is
more suitable than the original image for a particular application.
 Providing `better' input for other automated image processing techniques
o Spatial domain methods:

 operate directly on pixels

o Frequency domain methods:

 operate on the Fourier transform of an image

SPATIAL DOMAIN METHODS

* Suppose we have a digital image which can be represented by a two dimensional

random field f (x, y) .
* An image processing operator in the spatial domain may be expressed as a
mathematical function T f (x, y) to produce a new image g(x,
y T f (x, y
g(x, y T f (x, y
The operator T applied on f (x, y) may be defined over:
(i) A single pixel (x, y) . In this case T is a grey level transformation (or mapping)
function.
(ii) Some neighbourhood of (x, y) .
(iii) T may operate to a set of input images instead of a single image

The result of the transformation shown in the figure below is to produce an image of
higher contrast than the original, by darkening the levels below m and brightening the
levels above m in the original image. This technique is known as contrast stretching.
 Contrast stretching reduces an image of higher contrast than the original by
darkening the levels below m and brightening the levels above m in the image.

BASIC GRAY LEVEL TRANSFORMATIONS

* We begin the study of image enhancement techniques by discussing gray-level

transformation functions. These are among the simplest of all image enhancement
techniques. * The values of pixels, before and after processing, will be denoted by r and
s, respectively. As indicated in the previous section, these values are related by an
expression of the form s=T(r), where T is a transformation that maps a pixel value r into
a pixel value s. * Since we are dealing with digital quantities, values of the
transformation function typically are stored in a one-dimensional a r r a y and the
mappings from r to s are implemented v i a table lookups. For an 8-bit environment, a
lookup table containing the values of T will have 256 entries. * As an introduction to
gray-level transformations, consider Fig. which shows three basic types of functions
used frequently for image enhancement: linear (negative and identity transformations),
logarithmic (log and inverse-log transformations), and power-law (nth power and nth
root transformations). * The identity funct ion is the trivial case in which output int ens i t
ie s are identical to input intensities. It is included in the graph only for completeness.

POINT PROCESSING

 The simplest kind of range transformations are these independent of position

x,y:

g = T(f)
 This is called point processing.
 Important: every pixel for himself – spatial information completely lost!
Image Negative

The negative of an image with gray levels in the range [0, L-1] is obtained by
using the negative transformation shown in Fig. Reversing the intensity levels of an
image in this manner produces the equivalent of a photographic negative. This type of
processing is particularly suited for enhancing white or gray detail embedded in dark
regions of an image, especially when the black areas are dominant in size.

Log Transformations
The general form of the log transformation shown in Fig. 3.3 is s = c log (1 + r)
where c is a constant, and it is assumed that r 0.
 The shape of the log curve in Fig. 3.3 shows that this transformation maps a
narrow range of low gray-level values in the input image into a wider range of
output levels.
 The opposite is true of higher values of input levels. We would use a
transformation of this type to expand the values of dark pixels in an image while
compressing the higher-level values. The opposite is true of the inverse log
transformation
Contrast Stretching

Low contrast images occur often due to poor or non uniform lighting conditions,
or due to nonlinearity, or small dynamic range of the imaging sensor. In the figure of
Example 1 above you have seen a typical contrast stretching transformation.
Contrast stretching reduces an image of higher contrast than the original by darkening
the levels below m and brightening the levels above m in the image.

Histogram processing
 Measure frequency of occurrence of each grey/colour value

The histogram of a digital image with gray levels in the range [0, L-1] is a discrete
function h(rk)=nk. rk-kth gray level nk-number of pixels in the image having gray level rk.
By processing (modifying) the histogram of an image we can create a new image with
specific desired properties. Suppose we have a digital image of size NXN with grey
levels in the range [0,L-1] . The histogram of the image is defined as the following
discrete function:

The histogram represents the frequency of occurrence of the various grey levels in the
image. A plot of this function for all values of provides a global description of the
appearance of the image.

Grey Value Histogram

12000

10000

8000
Frequency

6000

4000

2000

0
1
16
31
46
61
76
91
106
121
136
151
166
181
196
211
226
241
256
Grey Value
Directional smoothing

To protect the edges from blurring while smoothing, a directional averaging filter can

be useful. Spatial averages are calculated in several selected directions (for

example could be horizontal, vertical, main diagonals

Median filtering

The median m of a set of values is the value that possesses the property that half
the values in the set are less than and half are greater than m . Median filtering is the
operation that replaces each pixel by the median of the grey level in the neighborhood
of that pixel. Median filters are non linear filters because for two sequences x(n) and
y(n)

Median filters are useful for removing isolated lines or points (pixels) while preserving
spatial resolutions. They perform very well on images containing binary (salt and
pepper) noise but perform poorly when the noise is Gaussian. Their performance is
also poor when the number of noise pixels in the window is greater than or half the
number of pixels in the window
 Image Enhancement

(a) Aerial image (b)-(d) results of of applying the transformation with c=1and
Ƴ=3,4 and 5 respectively

Brightness Adjustment

Add a constant to all values

g’ = g + k
(k = 50)

Contrast Adjustment

Scale all values by a constant

g’ = g*k
(k = 1.5)
Spatial Filtering

• Filters are commonly used for such things as edge enhancement, noise
removal, and the smoothing of high frequency data
• The principle of the various filters is to modify the numerical value of
each pixel as a function of the neighboring pixels’ values.
• For example, if the value of each pixel is replaced by the average of its
value and those of its eight neighbors the image is smoothed, that is to say,
the finer details disappear and the image appears fuzzier.
• For example, the filtered value of the pixel located at E5 is
(9*1/9) + (5*1/9) + (5*1/9) + (9*1/9) + (5*1/9) + (5*1/9) + (5*1/9) + (5*1/9) +
(5*1/9) = 5.89, rounded up to 6.
Spatial Feature Manipulation

• Spatial filters pass (emphasize) or suppress (de-emphasize) image data of

various spatial frequencies
• Spatial frequency refers to the number of changes in brightness value, per
unit distance, for any area within a scene
• Spatial frequency corresponds to image elements (both important details
and noise) of certain size
• High spatial frequency  rough areas
– High frequency corresponds to image elements of smallest size
– An area with high spatial frequency will have rapid change in
digital values with distance (i.e. dense urban areas and street
networks)
– Low spatial frequency  smooth areas
 – Low frequency corresponds to image elements of (relatively)
large size.
– An object with a low spatial frequency only changes slightly
over many pixels and will have gradual transitions in digital
values (i.e. a lake or a smooth water surface).

The Neighbourhood

A resampling technique that calculates the brightness value of a pixel in a

corrected image from the brightness value of the pixel nearest the location of the pixel
in the input image

Numerical Filters-Low Pass Filters

 Extract low frequency information (long wavelength)

 Suppress high frequency information (short wavelength)
 Low pass filter contains the same weights in each kernel
element,
 Replacing the center pixel value with an average of the
surrounding values
 Low pass filters are useful in smoothing an image, and reduce
"salt and pepper" (speckle) noise from SAR images.
Numerical Filters-High Pass Filters

 Are used for removing , for example, stripe noise of low

frequency (low energy, long short wavelengths)
 Filters that pass high frequencies (short wavelength)
 high pass filter uses a 3 x 3 kernel with a value of 8 for the
center pixel and values of -1 for the exterior pixels
 It can be used to enhance edges between different regions as
well as to sharpen an image

Masking

Mask is the small 2-D array in which the values of mask co-efficient determine
the nature of process. The enhancement technique based on this type of approach is
referred to as mask processing.
Unsharp Masking

1. Originally a photographic sharpening technique

2. Superimpose a fraction of the blurred negative
3. Edge enhancement amplifies noise
4. Tradeoff between edge enhancement and noise enhancement
5. Equivalent to adding on a fraction of Laplacian
Homomorphic filtering

Image Restoration

Image Restoration refers to a class of methods that aim to remove or reduce the
degradations that have occurred while the digital image was being obtained. All natural
images when displayed have gone through some sort of degradation:

 during display mode

 during acquisition mode, or
 during processing mode

The degradations may be due to

  sensor noise
 blur due to camera misfocus
 relative object-camera motion
 random atmospheric turbulence
 others

In most of the existing image restoration methods we assume that the degradation
process can be described using a mathematical model.

Objective of image restoration to recover a distorted image to the original form based on
idealized models. The distortion is due to
 Image degradation in sensing environment e.g. random atmospheric turbulence
 Noisy degradation from sensor noise.
 Blurring degradation due to sensors e.g. camera motion or out-of-focus
 Geometric distortion e.g. earth photos taken by a camera in a satellite

Comparison of enhancement and restoration

Image restoration differs from image enhancement in that the latter is concerned
more with accentuation or extraction of image features rather than restoration of
degradations.
Image restoration problems can be quantified precisely, whereas enhancement
criteria are difficult to represent mathematically.
Image degradation / restoration model

A general model of a simplified digital image degradation process

A simplified version for the image restoration process model is
y(i, j) = H[ f (i, j)]+ n(i, j)
where
y(i, j) the degraded image
f (i, j) the original image
H an operator that represents the degradation process
n(i, j) the external noise which is assumed to be image-independent

Restoration methods could be classified as follows:

 deterministic: we work with sample by sample processing of the observed

(degraded) image
 stochastic: we work with the statistics of the images involved in the process
 non-blind: the degradation process is known
 blind: the degradation process is unknown
  semi-blind: the degradation process could be considered partly known

Why the restoration is called as unconstrained restoration?

In the absence of any knowledge about the noise ‘n‘, a meaningful criterion function is
to seek an f^ such that H f^ approximates of in a least square sense by assuming the
noise term is as small as possible.

Where H = system operator.

f^ = estimated input image.

g = degraded image.

INVERSE FILTERING
WIENER FILTERING

CONSTRAINED LEAST SQUARES (CLS) RESTORATION

It refers to a very large number of restoration algorithms. The problem can be

formulated as follows. Minimize

subject to

where Cf is a high pass filtered version of the image. The idea behind the above
constraint is that the highpass version of the image contains a considerably large
amount of noise! Algorithms of the above type can be handled using optimization
techniques. Constrained least squares (CLS) restoration can be formulated by choosing
an f to minimize the Lagrangian

Typical choice for is the 2-D Laplacian operator given by C

α represents either a Lagrange multiplier or a fixed parameter known as regularisation

parameter and it controls the relative contribution between the term and the

term . The minimization of the above leads to the following estimate for the
original image

ITERATIVE DETERMINISTIC APPROACHES TO RESTORATION

They refer to a large class of methods that have been investigated extensively
over the last decades. They possess the following advantages.

 There is no need to explicitly implement the inverse of an operator. The

restoration process is monitored as it progresses. Termination of the algorithm
may take place before convergence.
 The effects of noise can be controlled in each iteration.
 The algorithms used can be spatially adaptive.
 The problem specifications are very flexible with respect to the type of
degradation.

Iterative techniques can be applied in cases of spatially varying or nonlinear

degradations or in cases where the type of degradation is completely unknown (blind
restoration). In general, iterative restoration refers to any technique that attempts to
minimize a function of the form M(f) using an updating rule for the partially restored
image.
 IMPORTANT QUESTIONS

TWO MARKS QUESTIONS

1. What is meant by Image Enhancement?

2. What is meant by Image Restoration?
3. Compare image enhancement and restoration.
4. Write notes on point operation.
5. Why the restoration is called as unconstrained restoration?
6. Briefly explain histogram modeling.
7. Write notes on root filtering.
8. What is meant by masking?
9. Write notes on interpolation.
10. Write notes on directional smoothening.

12 MARKS QUESTIONS

1. Explain the spatial domain Image Enhancement?

2. Briefly explain (a) median filtering (b) Homomorphic filtering
3. Explain about image restoration and degradation model.
4. Explain linear filtering and root filtering
5. Explain Inverse filtering and Wiener filter