Guided Filter for Color Image

Abstract: Image Enhancement is one of the most important and difficult techniques in digital image Processing. Image Enhancement is used for improving the quality. Many images like medical images, satellite images and real life photographs suffer from poor contrast and noise. It is necessary to enhance the contrast and remove the noise to increase image quality. Filtering is mostly used for enhancement and smoothing of input image. But in some edge preserving filtering technique gradient distortion and artifacts are observed. To resolve these problem guided filter is used. Guided filter is non-iterative, fast, accurate edge preserving filtering. The guided filter computes the filtering output by considering the content of a guidance image, which can be the input image or another different image. Guided filter uses the color images for implementation because color guidance image can better preserves the edges that are not distinguishable in gray-scale. Guided filter simulation done using MATLAB.

Keywords: FPGA, Guided filter, Image Enhancement, MATLAB