Image Edge Restoring Filter

TL;DR

The paper introduces the Edge Restoring Filter (ERF), a method that enhances edge preservation in local smoothing filters, improving image clarity in smoothing, denoising, and enhancement tasks.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel Edge Restoring Filter that can be combined with existing local smoothing filters to significantly improve edge preservation.

Findings

ERF effectively restores blurred edges in images.

Combining ERF with local filters yields better edge-preserving smoothing.

The method benefits various image processing applications.

Abstract

In computer vision, image processing and computer graphics, image smoothing filtering is a very basic and important task and to be expected possessing good edge-preserving smoothing property. Here we address the problem that the edge-preserving ability of many popular local smoothing filters needs to be improved. In this paper, we propose the image Edge Restoring Filter (ERF) to restore the blur edge pixels in the output of local smoothing filters to be clear. The proposed filter can been implemented after many local smoothing filter (such as Box filter, Gaussian filter, Bilateral Filter, Guided Filter and so on). The combinations of "original local smoothing filters + ERF" have better edge-preserving smoothing property than the original local smoothing filters. Experiments on image smoothing, image denoising and image enhancement demonstrate the excellent edges restoring ability of the proposed filter and good edgepreserving smoothing property of the combination "original local smoothing filters + ERF". The proposed filter would benefit a great variety of applications given that smoothing filtering is a high frequently used and fundamental operation.