Method and apparatus for processing digital images to suppress their noise and enhancing their sharpness

Abstract

A method of processing digital images to suppress their noise and enhance their sharpness. The method of suppressing noise and enhancing their sharpness includes steps of: (a) performing a sharpness enhancing process on original image data to generate sharpness enhance image data also performing a smoothing process on original image data to generate smoothed image data; (b) subtracting the smoothed image data from sharpness enhanced image data to extract a component consisting of both edges and noise; (c) performing nonlinear transformation on edge/noise containing component to separate a noise component and performing a subdividing process on the resulting noise component to produce a subdivided noise component; (d) separately detecting an edge component from original image data and determining weighting data for an edge region and a noise region from the detected edge component; (e) weighting edge/noise containing component with the weighting data for edge region to produce an edge enhancing component; and (f) subtracting subdivided noise component multiplied by a factor from sharpness enhanced image data while adding edge enhance component multiplied by another factor to sharpness enhanced image data so as to generate processed image data. The effect of the method is to process digital images to suppress their noise and enhance their sharpness.

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