Pyramid Texture Filtering
Qing Zhang Hao Jiang Yongwei Nie Wei-Shi Zheng
We present a simple but effective technique to smooth out textures while
preserving the prominent structures. Our method is built upon a key observation
-- the coarsest level in a Gaussian pyramid often naturally eliminates textures
and summarizes the main image structures. This inspires our central idea for
texture filtering, which is to progressively upsample the very low-resolution
coarsest Gaussian pyramid level to a full-resolution texture smoothing result
with well-preserved structures, under the guidance of each fine-scale Gaussian
pyramid level and its associated Laplacian pyramid level. We show that our
approach is effective to separate structure from texture of different scales,
local contrasts, and forms, without degrading structures or introducing visual
artifacts. We also demonstrate the applicability of our method on various
applications including detail enhancement, image abstraction, HDR tone mapping,
inverse halftoning, and LDR image enhancement.