Spatial Entropy Quartiles-Based Texture-Aware Fractional-Order Unsharp Masking for Visibility Enhancement of Remotely Sensed Images

A noniterative fractional-order (FO) two-dimensional (2-D) adaptive filtering mechanism is proposed in this article. Quartiles-based adaptive textural segmentation is employed for the calculation of texture-dependent FO. Statistically, the quartiles/quintiles/quantiles are cut points for dividing the range of a probability distribution into continuous intervals with equal probabilities. For the purpose of texture-based isolation of the spatial regions, a 2-D textural map is framed by evaluating spatial entropy by considering a pixel-wise local circular neighborhood. A novel end-to-end framework is proposed for FO texture-dependent image sharpening in an independent manner without influencing the other classes of textural regions. A novel inclusion of texture-wise adaptive gamma correction is also proposed in this article by drafting a mechanism where different kinds of textural regions can be separately processed in an independent manner. A novel quintiles-based multiscale Retinex (MSR) inspired approach for reflectance computation is coined in this article for suppressing environmental artifacts and unbalanced/nonuniform illumination. In this context, various scales required for MSR are themselves computed through quartiles-based intensity levels. The proposed model is highly modular. So, it can also be pipelined in a parallel manner, along with any well-established state-of-the-art contrast enhancement approach. Also, this approach is noniterative and highly robust. It can be proposed as an add-on for several possible (as well as pre-existing) image processing procedures. Rigorous comparative evaluations are performed so that the excellence of the proposed approach can be underlined.