Fast Edge Preserving 2D Smoothing Filter Using Indicator Function

Abstract

Edge-preserving smoothing filter smoothes the textures while it preserves the information of sharp edges. In image processing, this filter is used as a fundamental process of many applications. In this paper, we propose a new approach for edge-preserving smoothing filter. Our method uses 2D filter to smooth images and we apply indicator function to restrict the range of filtered pixels for edge-preserving. To define the indicator function, we recalculate the distance between each pixel by using edge information. The nearby pixels in the new domain are used for smoothing. Since our method constrains the pixels used for filtering, its implementation is quite fast. We demonstrate the usefulness of our new edge-preserving smoothing method for some applications.