LUM Smoother with Smooth Control for Noisy Image Sequences

This paper focuses on adaptive structure of LUM (lower-upper-middle) smoothers for noisy image sequences. For the balance between noise suppression and signal-detail preservation, the LUM smoothers are widely used in smoothing applications. The amount of smoothing done by LUM smoothers is controlled by tuning parameter. However, the smoothing level is fixed for whole image. Thus, the excessive or insufficient smoothing can be performed. This problem is solved by a new method based on the adaptive controlled level of smoothing. A new method has excellent performance of the noise reduction in the environments corrupted by the impulse noise. In addition, minimal signal-detail and motion blurring can be observed. The performance of proposed method is evaluated through objective criteria and compared with traditional temporal, spatial, and spatiotemporal LUM smoothers.