Multilevel filtering image denoising algorithm based on edge information fusion

Edges are critical important for the visual appearance of images. The traditional denoising algorithms are difficult to preserve the edges of the image while removing the noise of ICCD sensing image. At the same time, it is difficult to eliminate the problems of image darkness and low resolution caused by uneven illumination. This paper proposes a multilevel filtering image denoising algorithm based on edge information fusion. The target edges detection of the image after non-local means (NL-means) filtering is carried out based on the eight-direction Sobel operator. In order to filter the false edge points and residual noise, an adaptive threshold is determined according to the mean and variance of the eight neighborhood pixels of the detected pixel. Meanwhile, homomorphic filtering is used to enhance the image contrast and uniformity. By comparing the pixel values of the edge image and the homomorphic filtered image, the final denoised image is obtained by fusing the two images. The results indicate that, compared with the traditional algorithms, the edge preserving ability of the proposed algorithm is improved by more than 20%, and the denoising ability is improved by 63.5% for building target. For specific targets (vehicle), the results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm have the maximum edge preserving index and contrast, and the minimum non-uniformity. This algorithm lays a foundation for target segmentation and recognition.