Fast Bilateral Filtering of Vector-Valued Images

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a natural extension of the edge-preserving bilateral filter for vector-valued images. The direct computation of this non-linear filter is slow in practice. We demonstrate how a fast algorithm can be obtained by first approximating the Gaussian kernel of the bilateral filter using raised-cosines, and then using Monte Carlo sampling. We present simulation results on color images to demonstrate the accuracy of the algorithm and the speedup over the direct implementation.

To appear in IEEE International Conference on Image Processing