Patent ID: 6055340
Filing Date: 2000-04-25
Classification: G06T

Abstract:
A method of processing digital images to suppress their noise and enhance their sharpness, comprising the steps of:performing a sharpness enhancing process on original image data to generate sharpness enhanced image data;performing a smoothing process on said original image data to generate smoothed image data;subtracting the smoothed image data from said sharpness enhanced image data to extract a component consisting of both edges and noise;performing nonlinear transformation on said 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;separately detecting an edge component from said original image data and determining weighting data for an edge region and a noise region from the detected edge component;weighting said edge/noise containing component with the weighting data for said edge region to produce an edge enhancing component; andsubtracting said subdivided noise component multiplied by a factor from said sharpness enhanced image data while adding said edge enhanced component multiplied by another factor to said sharpness enhanced image data so as to generate processed image data.