Homogeneous Mask Area Filter

Filtering using homogeneous mask within area around a pixel used to estimate the expected gray value

fcnHomogeneousMaskAreaFilter performs noise filtering on an image based on searching for the most homogeneous mask within a search area around a pixel of interest. The method uses a square neighborhood of 5x5 pixels with 3x3 masks to estimate the gray-level homogeneity in each of the masks. The central pixel is replaced with the central estimate of the most homogeneous 3x3 mask found within the 5x5 search area around the pixel.

Method is based on

[1] M. Nagao and T. Matsuyama, "Edge preserving smoothing," Computer Graphics and Image Processing, vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 394–407, 1979. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0146-664X(79)90102-3]

Implementation is based on

[1] D. Sheet, S. Pal, A. Chakraborty, J. Chatterjee, A.K. Ray, "Image quality assessment for performance evaluation of despeckle filters in Optical Coherence Tomography of human skin," 2010 IEEE EMBS Conf. Biomedical Engineering and Sciences (IECBES), pp.499-504, Nov. 30 2010 - Dec. 2 2010. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/IECBES.2010.5742289]

[2] D. Sheet, S. Pal, A. Chakraborty, J. Chatterjee, A.K. Ray, "Visual importance pooling for image quality assessment of despeckle filters in Optical Coherence Tomography," 2010 Intl. Conf. Systems in Medicine and Biology (ICSMB), pp.102-107, 16-18 Dec. 2010. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICSMB.2010.5735353]