A new family of Gaussian filters with adaptive lobe location and smoothing strength for efficient image restoration

Noise can occur during image capture, transmission, or processing phases. Image de-noising is a very important step in image processing, and many approaches are developed in order to achieve this goal such as the Gaussian filter which is efficient in noise removal. Its smoothing efficiency depends on the value of its standard deviation. The mask representing the filter presents generally static weights with invariant lobe. In this paper, an adaptive de-noising approach is proposed. The proposed approach uses a Gaussian kernel with variable width and direction called adaptive Gaussian kernel (AGK). In each processed window of the image, the smoothing strength changes according to the image content, noise kind, and intensity. In addition, the location of its lobe changes in eight different directions over the processed window. This directional variability avoids averaging details by the highest mask weights in order to preserve the edges and the borders. The recovered data is de-noised efficiently without introducing blur or losing details. A comparative study with the static Gaussian filter and other recent techniques is presented to prove the efficiency of the proposed approach.