An Analog–Digital Hardware for L-Estimate Space-Varying Image Filtering

An analog–digital hardware solution for implementation of the L-estimate space-varying filtering has been proposed. The considered filter form is based on the robust space/spatial-frequency representation and provides efficient denoising of two-dimensional signals/images corrupted by heavy-tailed noise. Moreover, for images with fast-varying details and textures, the L-estimate filtering outperforms the commonly used filters. However, it requires significant processing time, since the space/spatial-frequency representation is calculated for each pixel, on a window by window basis. Therefore, in order to make it feasible for practical applications, a fast implementation of L-estimate space-varying filtering is proposed using a combined analog–digital approach. It provides efficient real-time processing of images corrupted by strong mixed Gaussian and impulse noise.