数字图像平滑和伽马滤波

Digital Image Smoothing and the Sigma Filter
数字图像平滑和伽马滤波

1.Introduction
引言

Generally,digital image smoothing techniques fall into two categories.In the first category,the noisy image is processed globally in the sense that the whole or a large section of a noisy image is correlated to obtain a smoothed image. Techniques in the transform domain using Wiener or leaset squrares filtering and techniques applying one-dimensional or two-dimensional Kalman filter are in this category. Statistical models for the signal(noise free image)and the noise are requried for the implementation fo these techniques.Unfortunately,the statistical model for most images is either unknown or impossible to describe adequately with a simple random process. The smoothed images display bllurred edges and conceal subtle details.In addition, the techniques are computationally costly. In the second category local operators are applied to noisy images. Only those pixels in a small neighborhood of the concerned pixel are involved in the computation, The immediate advantage of these techniques is their efficiency. They have great potential for real-time or near real-time implementation,because several pixels can be processed in parallel without waiting for their neighboring pixels to be processed. Recent research in image smoothing and segmentation favors the local techniques.
一般说来，数字图像平滑分为两大类别。在第一个类别中，是通过对噪声图像的全部或者很大一部分进行分析处理，得到平滑后图像。在技术实现上，一般采用维纳滤波和最小方差值滤波，或者使用一维或二维的卡尔曼滤波。这些方法的实现都需要知道无噪声图像信号及噪声信号的统计模型，但是显示，对于大多数图像，统计模型是不可能仅通过一个简单的随机函数等进行恰当描述的。使用这些方法得到的图像模糊，而且把细微细节都隐去了。另外，这些方法也是很耗时的。在第二种类别里，对噪声图像使用局部描述符进行描述。只对落在感兴趣像素领域里的像素进行计算，而不是针对全部。这种方法直接的好处就是很高效。因为像素之间的计算可以并行，这使得他们有很大的潜在可能性适用于实时或接近实时实现，近来的在图像平滑以及图像分割等领域的研究也支持了这种方法。

There are many local smoothing methods. The well-known median filter in one or two dimensions has attracted much attention. The edge preserving smoothing of Nagao and Masuyama, the gradient inverse weighting scheme of Wang et al., the box filtering algorithm, and the local statistics method of Lee are just a few other altorithms in this category. Obviously, it is nearly impossible to rank them, because an algorithm may be effective for a class of images, but ineffective for others. In this paper a new class of local smoothing schemes is introduced. It is motivated by the sigma probability of the Gaussian distribution. The basic idea is to replace the pixel to be processed by the average of only those neighboring pixels having their intensity within a fixed sigma range of the center pixel. Replacing the center pixel by the average of selected neighboring pixels has been explored by many algorithms. Nagao's filter replaces the center pixel by the average of a subregion which has minimum variance. Lee in his refined local statistics method selected the region by using gradient information. Graham and Prewitt replace a pixel by the average of the surrounding area if the absolute value of their difference is smaller than some threshold. Rosenfeld in his region growing and tracking algorithm excludes high contrast edges, lines,and points from the average by judging extended box-filtering algorithm restricts the average to only neighbouring pixels with a fixed intensity range. The main differencis between the box filter and the sigma filter of this paper is that the former has the intensity range fixed throughout the center pixel. The advantages are numerous:(1)noise near edge areas will be smoothed without blurring the edge because only pixels on one side of the edge are included in the average;(2)subtle details of several pixel clusters and linear features of one to three pixels in width will be preserved since only those pixels and not the background are included in the average; (3)it will not create artifacts and will retain shapes, because no directional masks are used, unlike the algorithms of Nagao and Lee; it is computationally efficient, since only simple compare and fixed point add instructions are involved.
有很多种局部平滑的方法，最为大家熟知的当属一维或二维的中值滤波，还有Ngao和Masuyama的边界保留平滑，Wang et al的灰度反转权重模式，箱式滤波算法（http://tech-algorithm.com/articles/boxfiltering/），以及Lee的局部统计方法。显然，我们无法对这几种方法分个三六九等，因为一种算法可能对某一类的图像处理效果较好，但对某些图像效果不好，在这篇文章中，我们提出一种新的局部平滑算法，它是基于高斯分布的伽马概率。基本的思想是把待处理的像素用与中心像素相距固定伽马参数值的像素的平均值来代替（翻译的不是很好，这句），用选中区域像素的均值来代替待处理像素，这种方法在很多算法都可以见到。Nagao的滤波器是具用最小变动值的像素的平均值来代替，Lee在其改进的算法中使用灰度信息来选取像素区域，Graham和Prewitt定义了一个阀值，如果选中像素与邻边像素值的差的绝对值在阀值内，就取这些满足要求的像素值的均值，来代替选中像素。Rosenfeld在他的算法把高亮度的边界，线以及点排除使用。。。方法。箱滤波与本文的伽马滤波方法的主要区别在于箱滤波将围绕中心像素的像素灰度值固定，伽马滤波的优点有几点：（1）在不平滑边界的同时，边界区域附近的噪声将被平滑，因为只有边界一边的像素将在取均值的时候包含，而另一边对均值没有贡献；（2）一些像素分类的细节及宽度在一到三个像素的线性特征将被保留，因为在对均值的计算过程中，只有这些像素而不包括背景将会包括；（3）不会产生虚假的信息，不会对图像进行改动，因为没有用到掩码，不像Nagao和Lee的算法；另外，它计算起来比较高效，因为只涉及简单的比较和固定点数的增加操作。

A comparison of the sigma filter,the gradient inverse filter,Nagao's filter,and the median filter are conducted in this paper. Comparisons are based on the following criteria:(1)effectiveness in smoothing noise;(2)preservation of suble details and linear features;(3)immunity from shape distortion;(4)retention of step edges and sharpening of ramp edges;(5)removal of high-contrast spot noise;(6)computational efficiency. For the smoothing algorithms to be effective they are applied iteratively three times to test images of dimension 128*128. In many respects the sigma filter performs better than other algorithms except as regards the ability to remove sharp spot noise. Some methods of reducing this deficiency are presented.
对于伽马滤波，灰度反转滤波，Nagao滤波，还有中值滤波的比较，在本篇论文中均有涉及。对这些方法的比较主要基于以下几点：（1）在噪声平滑上的高效性;(2)对局部细节及线性特征的保留；（3）形状不变形；（4）保留step边界，锐化ramp边界；（5）能够去除高亮度噪声；(6)运算快速；为使算法更高效，我们选取128*128的图像进行测试，并且迭代3次。结果显示在很多方法伽马滤波表现性能更优异，除了在去除某些尖锐的噪声外。弥补这一不足，有一些方法，在本文中也有所展现。

2.The Sigma Filter
伽马滤波器

The noise in an image is generally considered as spatially uncorrelated and with continuous intensity spectrum. White Gaussian noise is an example. We shall regard as noise any random clutter of the size of three or fewer pixels. It is well known that that the "straight" averaging filter will smooth noise at the expense of blurring edges and smearing subtle details. An indiscriminate average of pixels in a window is the cause of the problem. As mentioned in Section 1 many schemes have been developed to overcome this problem. The merits of these algorithms will be explored in more detail in the next section. In this section, a conceptually simple algo