The trilateral filter for high contrast images and meshes

  • Authors:
  • Prasun Choudhury;Jack Tumblin

  • Affiliations:
  • Northwestern University, Evanston, IL;Northwestern University, Evanston, IL

  • Venue:
  • EGRW '03 Proceedings of the 14th Eurographics workshop on Rendering
  • Year:
  • 2003

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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 nding 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.