Hybrid Filtering for Image Sharpening and Smoothing Simultaneously

In this paper, we propose a method for adjusting the sharpness, and in the meantime, it can enhance the smoothness of the black-and-white and color images simultaneously. Our filter can be divided into two terms, the smoothing filter and the sharpening filter. Both filters are connected with the binding filter used to define the filter weighting for a suitable area. The binding filter that we design based on a nonlinear combination of nearby image point values. The Laplacian filter is applied for constructing the binding filter that is designed similar to the Gaussian distribution function. The Gaussian Smoothing (GS) filter and High Boost (HB) filter are employed to construct the example of our hybrid filter. The processed image is compared with filtered image by the GS filter, HB filter, and bilateral filter for observing our filter performance, both the black-and-white images and color image. The experimental results show that our proposed filter can maintain the dominant properties of both GS filter and HB filter. It can reduce the noise in the flat area, and at the same time, it can increase the image sharpness in the edge region.