Geodesic paths approach to color image enhancement

New filter class for multichannel image processing is introduced and analyzed. The new technique of image enhancement is capable of reducing impulsive and Gaussian noise and it significantly outperforms the standard methods of noise reduction. In the paper a smoothing operator, based on a random walk model and a fuzzy similarity measure between pixels connected by a digital geodesic path is introduced. The efficiency of the proposed method was tested on the standard color images using the objective image quality measures. Obtained results show that the new method not only outperforms standard noise reduction algorithms, but has some interesting features useful for segmentation of noisy color images.