A content-adaptive sharpness enhancement algorithm using 2D FIR filters trained by pre-emphasis

•The first employs a dictionary-driven sharpening.•The second maximizes the sharpening performance through pre-emphasis.•The proposed algorithm outperforms the previous works in terms of objective quality as well as subjective quality.

This paper proposes a content-adaptive sharpening algorithm using two-dimensional (2D) FIR filters trained by pre-emphasis for various image pairs. In the learning stage, all low-quality (LQ) and high-quality (HQ) image pairs are first pre-emphasized, i.e., properly sharpened. Then selective 2D FIR filter coefficients for high-frequency synthesis are trained using the pre-emphasized LQ–HQ image pairs, and then are stored in a dictionary that resembles an LUT (look-up table). In the inference stage, each input image is pre-emphasized in the same manner as in the learning stage. The best-matched 2D filter for each LQ patch is then found in the dictionary, and an HQ patch corresponding to the input LQ patch is synthesized using the resultant 2D FIR filter. The experiment results show that the proposed algorithm visually outperforms existing ones and that the mean of absolute errors (MAEs) and MSSSIM (multi-scale structure similarity) of the proposed algorithm are about 10% to 60% lower and about 0.002–0.053 higher, respectively than those of the existing algorithms.