The remote sensing image enhancement based on nonsubsampled contourlet transform and unsharp masking

Abstract

SUMMARYTo restrain pseudo‐Gibbs phenomenon, low contrast and blurred phenomenon in the process of image enhancement, a new method based on the nonsubsampled contourlet transform and the unsharp masking is proposed in this paper. The proposed method utilizes the shift‐invariance of nonsubsampled contourlet transform to restrain the pseudo‐Gibbs phenomenon, and then enhance details of the image by unsharp masking. We achieved an increase in image definition by 54.5%, the mean increased by 15.6%, whereas the standard deviation increased by 54.5% compared with the unsharp masking method. To the noisy image, we achieved an increase in image definition by 35.4%, the mean increased by 2.2%, whereas the standard deviation increased by 34.9% compared with the unsharp masking method. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.