The Trilateral Filter for High Contrast Images and Meshes

Choudhury, Prasun; Tumblin, Jack

The Trilateral Filter for High Contrast Images and Meshes

Files

186-196.pdf (1.98 MB)

Date

2003

Authors

Choudhury, Prasun
Tumblin, Jack

Publisher

The Eurographics Association

Abstract

We present a new, single-pass nonlinear filter for edge-preserving smoothing and visual detail removal for N dimensional signals in computer graphics, image processing and computer vision applications. Built from two modified forms of Tomasi and Manduchi's bilateral filter, the new "trilateral" filter smoothes signals towards a sharply-bounded, piecewise-linear approximation. Unlike bilateral filters or anisotropic diffusion methods that smooth towards piecewise constant solutions, the trilateral filter provides stronger noise reduction and better outlier rejection in high-gradient regions, and it mimics the edge-limited smoothing behavior of shock-forming PDEs by region finding with a fast min-max stack. Yet the trilateral filter requires only one user-set parameter, filters an input signal in a single pass, and does not use an iterative solver as required by most PDE methods. Like the bilateral filter, the trilateral filter easily extends to N-dimensional signals, yet it also offers better performance for many visual applications including appearance-preserving contrast reduction problems for digital photography and denoising polygonal meshes.

        @inproceedings{10.2312:EGWR/EGWR03/186-196
,
booktitle = {Eurographics Workshop on Rendering
},
editor = {Philip Dutre and Frank Suykens and Per H. Christensen and Daniel Cohen-Or
},
title = {{The Trilateral Filter for High Contrast Images and Meshes
}},
author = {Choudhury, Prasun and 
Tumblin, Jack
},
year = {2003
},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association
},
ISSN = {1727-3463
},
ISBN = {3-905673-03-7
},
DOI = {10.2312/EGWR/EGWR03/186-196
}
}