A novel real-time edge-preserving smoothing filter

The segmentation of textured and noisy areas in images is a very challenging task due to the large variety of objects and materials in natural environments, which cannot be solved by a single similarity measure. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a novel edge-preserving texture filter, which smudges the color values inside uniformly textured areas, thus making the processed image more workable for color-based image segmentation. Due to the highly parallel structure of the method, the implementation on a GPU runs in realtime, allowing us to process standard images within tens of milliseconds. By preprocessing images with this novel filter before applying a recent real-time color-based image segmentation method, we obtain significant improvements in performance for images from the Berkeley dataset, outperforming an alternative version using a standard bilateral filter for preprocessing. We further show that our combined approach leads to better segmentations in terms of a standard performance measure than graph-based and mean-shift segmentation for the Berkeley image dataset.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

Detail-preserving and Content-aware Variational Multi-view Stereo Reconstruction

Accurate recovery of 3D geometrical surfaces from calibrated 2D multi-view images is a fundamental yet active research area in computer vision. Despite the steady progress in multi-view stereo reconstruction, most existing methods are still limited in recovering fine-scale details and sharp features while suppressing noises, and may fail in reconstructing regions with few textures. To address these limitations, this paper presents a Detail-preserving and Content-aware Variational (DCV) multi-view stereo method, which reconstructs the 3D surface by alternating between reprojection error minimization and mesh denoising. In reprojection error minimization, we propose a novel inter-image similarity measure, which is effective to preserve fine-scale details of the reconstructed surface and builds a connection between guided image filtering and image registration. In mesh denoising, we propose a content-aware $\ell_{p}$-minimization algorithm by adaptively estimating the $p$ value and regularization parameters based on the current input. It is much more promising in suppressing noise while preserving sharp features than conventional isotropic mesh smoothing. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our DCV method is capable of recovering more surface details, and obtains cleaner and more accurate reconstructions than state-of-the-art methods. In particular, our method achieves the best results among all published methods on the Middlebury dino ring and dino sparse ring datasets in terms of both completeness and accuracy.Comment: 14 pages,16 figures. Submitted to IEEE Transaction on image processin