A new multiresolution generalized directional filter bank design and application in image enhancement

Vishal M. Patel, Glenn R. Easley, Dennis M. Healy Jr.

Abstract: In this paper, we present an image enhancement technique based on a new multiscale generalized directional filter bank design. The design presented is a shift-invariant overcomplete representation, which is well suited to extracting geometric features such as edges. Special cases of this design method can be made to reduce to different and improved implementations of the shearlet and the contourlet transforms, which are known to represent certain classes of images optimally. Use of this new filter bank design has proven itself competitive in image restoration for noisy images and is well suited for distinguishing noise from weak edges. Experimental results show that our unique image enhancement technique out-performs wavelet and contourlet based enhancement methods.