What are the MLV and MCV filters?
The Mean of Least Variance (MLV) filter is an edge-preserving (actually
edge-enhancing) noise smoothing filter based on the concepts of mathematical
morphology. I'm hoping to put together a decent description of it for this
page in the near future. Basically the idea is to smooth an image only over
areas that have a low variance - that is, areas that are most nearly homogeneous
and do not contain edges or other features. The MCV filter is similar, except
that it uses the Coefficient of Variation rather than the variance to perform
better on multiplicative noise. Details are found in the following
references:
References for the MLV filter:
Mark A. Schulze. "Biomedical Image Processing with Morphology-Based Nonlinear Filters."
Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin, 1994. The Abstract and
Table of Contents are available.
M. A. Schulze and J. A. Pearce. "A morphology-based filter structure for
edge-enhancing smoothing." Proc. of the 1994 IEEE International Conference on
Image Processing (ICIP-94), pp. 530-534. (Austin, Texas, Nov. 13-16, 1994.) The
abstract for this paper is available.
M. A. Schulze and J. A. Pearce. "Value-and-criterion filters: a new filter
structure based upon morphological opening and closing." In E. R. Dougherty,
J. Astola, and H. Longbotham, eds.,
Nonlinear Image Processing IV. Proc.
SPIE, v. 1902 (1993) pp. 106-115. (San Jose, California, Feb. 1-3, 1993.)
References for the MLV and MCV filters:
M. A. Schulze and Q. X. Wu. "Noise reduction in synthetic aperture radar imagery
using a morphology-based nonlinear filter." Proceedings of
DICTA95, Digital Image Computing: Techniques and Applications, pp. 661-666. (Brisbane, Australia,
December 6-8, 1995.) The extended abstract and
final published abstract for this paper are
available.
M. A. Schulze and Q. X. Wu. "Nonlinear filtering for edge-preserving smoothing of
synthetic aperture radar imagery." Proceedings of the New Zealand Image and Vision
Computing '95 Workshop, pp. 65-70. (Christchurch, New Zealand, August 28-29, 1995.) The
abstract for this paper is available.
Further Information
Please see my list of publications or contact me
for further information about the MLV and MCV filters.
Return to Image Processing in Java.
Mark A. Schulze
http://www.markschulze.net/
mark@markschulze.net
Last Updated: 23 July 2003
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