Edge-Preserving Smoothers
Philippe Thévenaz

Seminar • 09 January 2011 • BM 4.233

Abstract
After a short review of a few classical edge-preserving smoothers, we focus on a specific one called the bilateral filter, which has attracted the attention of practitioners due to its versatility. Unfortunately, its brute-force implementation is taxed by a severe computational cost, but several authors were able to overcome this drawback by proposing accelerated versions. The ingenuity of these solutions warrants their presentation. Our own contribution is yet another fast edge-preserving smoother. Contrarily to the previous ones, its construction does not proceed from an attempt at accelerating the bilateral filter. Notwithstanding, we demonstrate that our filter has formal links with it. Our cost per pixel is constant and depends neither on the data nor on the filter parameters, not even on the degree of smoothing. In Java, our performance is better than 25 frames per second for an image of size 512x512.