Image sharpening refers to any enhancement technique that highlights edges and fine details in an image. The conventional
methods for sharpening the images has several drawbacks such as, complex and slow calculations, color loss, anisotropy effects
etc. In this paper, a new fuzzy filter is proposed for sharpening the color images. The sharpening fuzzy filter consists of
two sub-filters. The first sub-filter computes fuzzy distances between the central pixel and its neighbourhood for each color
component. These distances determine the edge information present at each pixel. The purpose of the second sub-filter is to
apply a sharpening parameter λ and a correction term ε to each pixel neighbourhood (3×3 window) thereby enhancing the edge information to get the sharpened image. The performance
of the filter has been tested on various standard images and comparison is done both visually and quantitatively with other
conventional sharpening filters.
Keywords Sharpening - filter - fuzzy - distance measure - color images