Morphological sharpening of color images

Abstract

Abstract This paper presents a novel approach to morphological contrast sharpening of image using the multilevel toggle operator. The concept presented here is a generalization of toggle based contrast operator for gray-level images. The multilevel toggle operator is used to enhance the contrast of multivalued images. In order to perform necessary morphological operations the modified pairwise ordering (MPO) algorithm is proposed. It gives the total order of color pixels. For comparison four other ordering methods are used. The main advantage of the proposed sharpener is its significant contrast enhancing ability when using MPO. Theoretical considerations as well as practical results are shown. Experimental results show its applicability to low-contrast color images.