Adaptive Directional Sharpening with Overshoot Control

This paper presents an efficient solution for digital images sharpening, the Adaptive Directional Sharpening with Overshoot Control (ADSOC), a method based on a high-pass filter able to perform a stronger sharpening in the detailed zones of the image, preserving the homogeneous regions. The basic objective of this approach is to reduce the undesired effects. The sharpening introduced along strong edges or into uniform regions could provide unpleased ringing artifacts and noise amplification, which are the most common drawbacks of the sharpening algorithms. The ADSOC allows to the user to choose the ringing intensity and it doesn't increase the isolated noisy pixel luminance value. Moreover, the ADSOC works the orthogonally respect to the direction of the edges in the blurred image, in order to yield a more effective contrast enhancement. The experiments showed good algorithm performances in terms of booth visual quality and computational complexity.