Shock filter-based morphological scheme for texture enhancement

Coherence enhancing shock filters combine shock filtering with the orientation estimation of the structure tensors thus enhancing the coherent flow-like structures. The basic operations defined here are dilation and erosion that take place in the zones of influence. However, in order to achieve the goal of texture enhancement, in the proposed method, the authors have extended this notion to define an opening and closing based shock filter. Subsequently, the open-close filtered image is employed to locate and highlight the bright and dark texture features over the entirety of the image. Combining these feature images with the original image in a specific way will produce an image with texture features enhanced. Furthermore, we have performed these operations at different scales to achieve better enhancement of the texture features. The method has been formulated, implemented and tested over a number of synthetic and natural texture images and the experimental results establish the efficacy of the proposed method in enhancing the prominent texture parts in the image proportionately more than the non-prominent texture parts.