Removal of Artifacts Based on Weighted Guided Image Filtering For Improving Visual Quality of an Image

Abstract

In this paper, a weighted guided image filter (WGIF) is proposed to address the problems faced by the existing methods such as global and local filtering techniques. Local filtering-based edge preserving smoothing techniques suffer from halo artifacts. The global optimization based filters often yield excellent quality, they have high computational cost. The WGIF receives  advantages of both global and local smoothing filters in the sense that: 1) the complexity of the WGIF is O(N) for an image with N pixels, which is same as the GIF and 2) the WGIF can avoid halo artifacts like the existing global smoothing filters. The WGIF is applied for single image detail enhancement, single image haze removal, and fusion of differently exposed images. Experimental results shows that the resultant image produces better visual quality by reducing/avoiding the halo artifacts to zero.