Unsharp Masking Sharpening Detection via Overshoot Artifacts Analysis

Abstract

In this letter, we propose a new method in detecting unsharp masking (USM) sharpening operation in digital images. Overshoot artifacts are found to occur around side-planar edges in the sharpened images. Such artifacts, measured by a sharpening detector, can serve as a rather unique feature for identifying the previous performance of sharpening operation. Test results on photograph images with regard to various sharpening operators show the effectiveness of our proposed method.