Tip #37Kinesense LE

How to reduce noise and sharpen an image

Clean up low-light noise with median, conservative or adaptive smoothing, and recover detail with basic or Gaussian sharpening.

Patricia McCabeSoftware Engineer

Clarifications again this week. Previously we looked at cropping clarifications and rotating and scaling. Today it is Noise reduction and Sharpness

When you want to remove noise from your licence plate or sharpen up an image of a suspect looking bunny, Kinesense has the tools for you!

Noise Removal Noise removal button

A noisy image of a licence plate before and after median noise removal.

When your image or video contains a lot of noise, which often happens in low light situations, Kinesense has 3 different options to help reduce it.

The noise removal options: Median, Conservative Smoothing and Adaptive Smoothing.

Median – Median is a generic noise reduction that replaces each pixel with the median value of its immediate neighbour

**Conservative Smoothing –**Uses a filtering algorithm designed to remove noise in the form of pixels of exceptionally high or low intensity, like Salt and Pepper noise. This reduction focuses on protecting general features more.

**Adaptive Smoothing –**This option is used to remove noise while preserving sharp edges within the image. It does not work well for salt and pepper noise.

Sharpening Sharpening button

To remove some amount of ‘blurring’ from an image you can use the Sharpening Clarification.

An image of a rabbit in grass before and after sharpening.

If we zoom in on the ear, you can see the effect more clearly…

A close-up of the rabbit’s ear before and after sharpening.

There are two modes from this with different options.

**Mode 1 –**This is a basic sharpening algorithm that can quickly provide a reasonable result

**Mode 2 –**This uses Gaussian sharpen to create a better result but this takes significantly more processing. There are 3 set options, Weaker, Normal and Stronger, and a Custom option that lets you set the sigma and kernel. These are Gaussian settings that you can learn more about here.

Kinesense also has a special ‘deblur’ clarification, which we will deal with in a future post.

Format support

3000+ video formats

Anything playable in Windows Media Player, VLC or FFmpeg is supported, without the manufacturer's original player. Have a format that isn't listed? Our engineers have 17 years experience of dealing with difficult formats.