Spatially Adaptive Image Restoration Using Fuzzy Punctual Kriging

We present a general formulation based on punctual kriging and fuzzy concepts for image restoration in spatial domain. Gray-level images degraded with Gaussian white noise have been considered. Based on the pixel local neighborhood, fuzzy logic has been employed intelligently to avoid unnecessary estimation of a pixel. The intensity estimation of the selected pixels is then carried out by employing punctual kriging in conjunction with the method of Lagrange multipliers and estimates of local semi-variances. Application of such a hybrid technique performing both selection and intensity estimation of a pixel demonstrates substantial improvement in the image quality as compared to the adaptive Wiener filter and existing fuzzykriging approaches. It has been found that these filters achieve noise reduction without loss of structural detail information, as indicated by their higher structure similarity indices, peak signal to noise ratios and the new variogram based quality measures.