An effective edge-preserving smoothing method for image manipulation

This paper presents a novel and effective edge-preserving image smoothing method for edge-aware image manipulation. The method formulates the smoothing as a problem of minimizing a convex object function with a constraint and an efficient solution to the optimization problem is presented. Specifically, the method provides an unified framework to regularize the edge and texture pixels in the optimization so that geometric edges representing image structures can be well retained and fine edges of texture regions are removed or suppressed. Both qualitative and quantitative experimental results on natural images and computer-generated structured images have shown the efficacy of the proposed method. In addition, the proposed method can improve the performance of many image processing and manipulation tasks including edge extraction and simplification, non-photorealistic rendering, detail and contrast exaggeration, HDR tone mapping, block-based discrete cosine transform (BDCT) artifact removal and content-aware image resizing, as demonstrated through the experiments.