A cubic unsharp masking technique for contrast enhancement

The Cubic Unsharp Masking method is introduced in this paper. It is demonstrated, through both a statistical study and some computer simulations, that the proposed method has a much reduced noise sensitivity with respect to the linear unsharp masking technique and it permits to obtain perceptually pleasant results. The proposed operator also compares favourably with other algorithms which recently have been studied to improve the behaviour of the unsharp masking approach.