A New Method for Sharpening Color Images Using Fuzzy Approach

Image sharpening refers to any enhancement technique that highlights edges and fine details in an image. The conventional methods for sharpening the images has several drawbacks such as, complex and slow calculations, color loss, anisotropy effects etc. In this paper, a new fuzzy filter is proposed for sharpening the color images. The sharpening fuzzy filter consists of two sub-filters. The first sub-filter computes fuzzy distances between the central pixel and its neighbourhood for each color component. These distances determine the edge information present at each pixel. The purpose of the second sub-filter is to apply a sharpening parameter λ and a correction term ε to each pixel neighbourhood (3×3 window) thereby enhancing the edge information to get the sharpened image. The performance of the filter has been tested on various standard images and comparison is done both visually and quantitatively with other conventional sharpening filters.