Color image sharpening by moment-preserving technique

A new approach to sharpening color images using the moment-preserving technique is proposed. An input image is processed pixel by pixel. By preserving some color moments of the n x n neighborhood of each pixel, analytic formulas are derived to compute two sets of (R, G, B) tristimulus values, and one of them is assigned to the pixel as the sharpening result. Cases with one or more uniform color components in the neighborhood are also treated. The proposed method preserves spatial details, and requires little memory and small computational load. The proposed sharpening operation can also be applied iteratively to the input image to get better sharpening effect. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is effective for color image sharpening.