. This paper gives an overview of scale-space and image enhancement techniques which are based on parabolic partial differential equations in divergence form. In the nonlinear setting this filter class allows to integrate a-priori knowledge into the evolution. We sketch basic ideas behind the different filter models, discuss their theoretical foundations and scale-space properties, discrete aspects, suitable algorithms, generalizations, and applications. 1 Introduction During the last decade nonlinear diffusion filters have become a powerful and well-founded tool in multiscale image analysis. These models allow to include a-priori knowledge into the scale-space evolution, and they lead to an image simplification which simultaneously preserves or even enhances semantically important information such as edges, lines, or flow-like structures. Many papers have appeared proposing different models, investigating their theoretical foundations, and describing interesting applications. For a n...

The completion of interrupted lines or the enhancement of flow-like structures is a challenging task in computer vision, human vision, and image processing. We address this problem by presenting a multiscale method in which a nonlinear diffusion filter is steered by the so-called interest operator (second-moment matrix, structure tensor). An m-dimensional formulation of this method is analysed with respect to its well-posedness and scale-space properties. An efficient scheme is presented which uses a stabilization by a semi-implicit additive operator splitting (AOS), and the scale-space behaviour of this method is illustrated by applying it to both 2-D and 3-D images.

We present a unified anisotropic geometric diffusion PDE model for smoothing (fairing) out noise both in triangulated twomanifold surface meshes in R³ and functions defined on these surface meshes, while enhancing curve features on both by careful choice of an anisotropic diffusion tensor. We combine the C¹ limit representation of Loop’s subdivision for triangular surface meshes and vector functions on the surface mesh with the established diffusion model to arrive at a discretized version of the diffusion problem in the spatial direction. The time direction discretization then leads to a sparse linear system of equations. Iteratively solving the sparse linear system yields a sequence of faired (smoothed) meshes as well as faired functions.

We are interested in PDE’s (Partial Differential Equations) in order to smooth multi-valued images in an anisotropic manner. Starting from a review of existing anisotropic regularization schemes based on diffusion PDE’s, we point out the pros and cons of the different equations proposed in the literature. Then, we introduce a new tensor-driven PDE, regularizing images while taking the curvatures of specific integral curves into account. We show that this constraint is particularly well suited for the preservation of thin structures in an image restoration process. A direct link is made between our proposed equation and a continuous formulation of the LIC’s (Line Integral Convolutions by Cabral and Leedom [11]). It leads to the design of a very fast and stable algorithm that implements our regularization method, by successive integrations of pixel values along curved integral lines. Besides, the scheme numerically performs with a sub-pixel accuracy and preserves then thin image structures better than classical finite-differences discretizations. Finally, we illustrate the efficiency of our generic curvature-preserving approach- in terms of speed and visual quality- with different comparisons and various applications requiring image smoothing: color images denoising, inpainting and image resizing by nonlinear interpolation.

Signal and image enhancement is considered in the context of a new type of diffusion process that simultaneously enhances, sharpens and denoises images. The nonlinear diffusion coefficient is locally adjusted according to image features such as edges, textures and moments. As such it can switch the diffusion process from a forward to a backward (inverse) mode according to a given set of criteria. This results in a forward-and-backward (FAB) adap- tive diffusion process that enhances features while locally denoising smoother segments of the signal or image. The proposed method, using the FAB process, is applied in a super-resolution scheme.

This paper addresses the problem of feature enhancement in noisy images, when the feature is known to be constrained to a manifold. As an example, we approach the orientation denoising problem via the geometric Beltrami framework for image processing. The feature (orientation) field is represented accordingly as the embedding of a two dimensional surface in the spatial-feature manifold. The resulted Beltrami flow is a selective smoothing process that respects the feature constraint. Orientation diffusion is treated as a canonical example where the feature (orientation in this case) space is the unit circle S1. Applications to color analysis are discussed and numerical experiments demonstrate again the power of the Beltrami framework for nontrivial geometries in image processing. C ○ 2002 Elsevier Science (USA) 1.

We develop a novel time-selection strategy for iterative image restoration techniques: the stopping time is chosen so that the correlation of signal and noise in the filtered image is minimised. The new method is applicable to any images where the noise to be removed is uncorrelated with the signal; no other knowledge (e.g. the noise variance, training data etc.) is needed. We test the performance of our time estimation procedure experimentally, and demonstrate that it yields near-optimal results for a wide range of noise levels and for various filtering methods.

We present a unified anisotropic geometric diffusion PDE model for smoothing (fairing) out noise both in triangulated 2-manifold surface meshes in R³ and functions defined on these surface meshes, while enhancing curve features on both by careful choice of an anisotropic diffusion tensor. We combine the C¹ limit representation of Loop's subdivision for triangular surface meshes and vector functions on the surface mesh with the established diffusion model to arrive at a discretized version of the diffusion problem in the spatial direction. The time

. We present a framework for enhancing images while preserving either the edge or the orientation-dependent texture information present in them. We do this by treating images as manifolds in a feature-space. This geometrical interpretation leads to a natural way for grey level, color, movies, volumetric medical data, and color-texture image enhancement. Following this, we invoke the Polyakov action from high-energy physics, and develop a minimization procedure through a geometric flow. This flow, based on manifold volume minimization yields a natural enhancement procedure. We apply this framework to edgepreserving denoising of grey value and color images, for volumetric medical data, and orientation-preserving flows for grey level and color texture images. 1 Introduction In this paper, we present a general framework for processing images of various types like grey scale, color, and those that have orientation-dependent information such as textures. We do this by treating images as emb...

Optical Flow estimation in noisy image sequences requires a special denoising strategy. Towards this end we introduce a new tensor-driven anisotropic diffusion scheme which is designed to enhance optical-flow-like spatiotemporal structures. This is achieved by selecting diffusivities in a special manner depending on the eigenvalues of the well known structure tensor. We illustrate how the proposed choice differs from edge- and coherence-enhancing anisotropic diffusion. Furthermore we extend a recently discovered discretization scheme for anisotropic diffusion to 3D data. An automatic stop criterion to terminate the diffusion after a suitable time is given. The performance of the introduced method is examined quantitatively using image sequences with a substantial amount of noise added. 1.