An Efficient Structure-Aware Bilateral Texture Filtering for Image Smoothing

Abstract

Photos contain well-structured and plentiful visual information. Edges are active and expressive stimuli for human visual perception. However, it is hard to separate structure from details because edge strength and object scale are entirely different concepts. This paper proposes a structure-aware bilateral texture algorithm to remove texture patterns and preserve structures. Our proposed method is simple and fast, as well as effective in removing textures. Instead of patch shift, smaller patches represent pixels located at structure edges, and original patches represent the texture regions. Specifically, this paper also improves joint bilateral filter to preserve small structures. Moreover, a windowed inherent variation is adapted to distinguish textures and structures for detecting structure edges. Finally, the proposed method produces excellent experimental results. These results are compared to some results of previous studies. Besides, structure-preserving filtering is a critical operation in many image processing applications. Our proposed filter is also demonstrated in many attractive applications, such as seam carving, detail enhancement, artistic rendering, etc.