Abstract—Conventionally, in order to sharpen and enhance blurred digital images, unsharp masking (UM) has been used widely. However, over-enhancement is generated frequently in edge parts of the image and the artifacts such as jaggy and halo are sometimes seen in the resultant image. To cope with the problem, the selective UM methods were proposed so far. However, they were not always effective for the realization of the artifact suppression and image sharpening at the same time. In this paper, we propose new selective UM methods which employ the bilateral filter and Laplacian of intensity and/or saturation components of image. In the methods, the occurrence of jaggy and halo is suppressed by weakening the sharpening effect especially at the edge parts of objects in the image, and the image is well sharpened totally. Through the experiments using some images, the effectiveness of the proposed methods is illustrated. 

Index Terms—image sharpening, unsharp masking, selective unsharp masking, bilateral filter

Cite: Noriaki Suetake, Yohei Kuramoto, Eiji Uchino, Kazuhiro Tokunaga, and Sadanori Hirose, "Bilateral Filter Based Selective Unsharp Masking Using Intensity and/or Saturation Components," International Journal of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, , Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 10-14, March 2013. doi: 10.12720/ijeee.1.1.10-14