Bilateral Filters

Bilateral Filters

Bilateral filtering is a non-linear filtering technique introduced by Tomasi et al. [1]. It extends the concept of Gaussian smoothing by weighting the filter coefficients with their corresponding relative pixel intensities. Pixels that are very different in intensity from the central pixel are weighted less even though they may be in close proximity to the central pixel. This is effectively a convolution with a non-linear Gaussian filter, with weights based on pixel intensities. This is applied as two Gaussian filters at a localized pixel neighborhood , one in the spatial domain, named thedomain filter, and one in the intensity domain, named the range filter. A very intuitive mathematical approach is given in [5] as follows.

Let f: Re→Re be the original brightness function of an image which maps the coordinates of a pixel (x, y) to a value in light intensity. Then for any given pixela at (x,y) within a neighborhood of size n, which has a₀ as its centre, its coefficient assigned by the range filterr(a) is determined by the following function:

Similarly, its coefficient assigned by the domain filter g(a) is determined by the closeness function below:

where t is the scale parameter.
For the central pixel of the neighborhood a₀ , its new value, denoted by h(a₀)

k is the normalization constant to maintain zero-gain and is defined as follows

Pixels close to the central pixel a₀ in both space and intensity contribute more than those further away in space and intensity. This is represented graphically in Fig 8 (obtained from [7]) .

Fig 8: Bilateral filtering.

Both sigma_d and sigma_r determine the level of smoothness. setting sigma_r to zero reduces the bilateral filter to a simple Gaussian smoothing filter.

Use for Image Scaling.

We apply the bilateral filter above to our original image before the laplacian edge detection to smooth out the noise while maintaining edges. We can then enhance the edges without amplifying noise. Fig 9 shows the application of the bilateral filter on same noisy image of Lena from the previous section . Comparing the performance with vs. without bilateral filtering, the improvement both in noise reduction and edge-preservation should be apparent.

Fig 9: Bilateral Filtering for noiseless edge preservation.

It is interesting to note that we explored application of the same bilateral filter after scaling (adjusted corrected for new domain scale) rather than before as shown in Fig 10. The results were very comparable (Fig. 9). It is computationally cheaper hence preferable to perform the bilateral filtering prior to scaling.

Fig 10: Comparison between bilateral before and after scaling and the difference between them.

 

 

 

参照国外的介绍:http://scien.stanford.edu/pages/labsite/2006/psych221/projects/06/imagescaling/bilati.html