Acoustic image enhancement using Gaussian and laplacian pyramid – a multiresolution based technique

Acoustic images captured by side scan sonar are normally affected by speckle noise for which the enhancement is required in different domain. The underwater acoustic images obtained using sound as a source, basically contain seafloor, sediments, living and non-living resources. The Multiresolution based image enhancement techniques nowadays play a vital role in improving the quality of the low resolution image with repeated patterns. Image pyramid is the representation of an image at various scales. In this work, a three level Gaussian and Laplacian pyramids are constructed to represent the image in different resolution. The multiscale representation requires different filters at different scales. The contrast of each image in Gaussian and Laplacian pyramids are improved by applying both histogram equalization and unsharp masking method. The sharpened images are used to reconstruct the enhanced image. The performance measure, peak signal to noise ratio proves that the unsharp masking method applied to difference images of Laplacian pyramid outperforms the other image enhancement methods.