Image enhancement for pattern recognition

We investigate various image enhancement techniques geared towards a specific detector. Our database consists of side- scan sonar images collected at the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC), and the detector we use has proven to have excellent results on these data. We start by investigating various wavelet and wavelet packet denoising methods. Other methods we consider are based on more common filters (Gaussian and DOG filters). In wavelet based denoising we try different approaches, combining techniques that have been successfully used in signal and image denoising. We notice that the performance is mostly affected by the choice of the scale levels to which shrinkage is applied. We demonstrate that wavelet denoising can significantly improve detection performance while keeping low false alarm rates.