Non-Linear Structure-Aware Image Sharpening with Difference of Smoothing Operators

In this paper, we propose an effective data-adaptive filtering mechanism for sharpening of noisy and moderately blurred images. We establish the connection of our proposed data-adaptive filtering procedure with the classic Difference of Gaussians (DoG) operator widely used in image processing and computer graphics. Our proposed filter renders a data-adaptive and noise robust version of the classical DoG filter. We also discuss interesting special cases of our general sharpening method. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed technique for sharpening real images.