AN EFFICIENT IMAGE ENHANCEMENT ALGORITHM FOR SONAR DATA

This study proposes an alternative effective sonar image enhancement algorithm. The method basically composes of two steps, including noise reduction and image sharpening. The sonar image is first de-noised using Wiener and median filters, and then it is enhanced using unsharp masking and histogram equalization. The proposed algorithm has been verified on many sonar images of different underwater structures, and shows its efficiency comparing to some well-known sonar noise reduction methods applying for sonar image data.

[1]  Jasdeep Kaur,et al.  An Improved Weighted Median Filter for the Image Processing Application , 2013 .

[2]  Alexander A. Sawchuk,et al.  Adaptive Noise Smoothing Filter for Images with Signal-Dependent Noise , 1985, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[3]  Xiaorong Gao,et al.  A novel multiscale nonlinear thresholding method for ultrasonic speckle suppressing , 1999, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[4]  Victor S. Frost,et al.  A Model for Radar Images and Its Application to Adaptive Digital Filtering of Multiplicative Noise , 1982, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[5]  H.M. Wechsler,et al.  Digital image processing, 2nd ed. , 1981, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[6]  Ioannis Pitas,et al.  Digital Image Processing Algorithms and Applications , 2000 .

[7]  Andrew F. Laine,et al.  Speckle reduction and contrast enhancement of echocardiograms via multiscale nonlinear processing , 1998, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging.

[8]  Jong-Sen Lee,et al.  Digital Image Enhancement and Noise Filtering by Use of Local Statistics , 1980, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[9]  S. Haykin.  Adaptive Filters , 2007 .

[10]  T. Loupas,et al.  An adaptive weighted median filter for speckle suppression in medical ultrasonic images , 1989 .

[11]  Stuart Perry,et al.  Applications of Image Processing to Mine WarFare Sonar , 2000 .

[12]  Xiaorong Gao,et al.  Multi-Scale Nonlinear Thresholding for Ultrasonic Speckle Suppression , 1999, IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging.

[13]  Alin Achim,et al.  Image denoising using bivariate α-stable distributions in the complex wavelet domain , 2005, IEEE Signal Processing Letters.

[14]  I. Selesnick,et al.  Bivariate shrinkage with local variance estimation , 2002, IEEE Signal Processing Letters.

[15]  Alexandru Isar,et al.  A New Denoising System for SONAR Images , 2009, EURASIP J. Image Video Process..