[IPOL announce] new article: A Fast Approximation of the Bilateral Filter using the Discrete Fourier Transform

[announcements about the IPOL journal]

A new article is available in IPOL: http://www.ipol.im/pub/art/2017/184/

Pravin Nair, Anmol Popli, and Kunal N. Chaudhury,
A Fast Approximation of the Bilateral Filter using the Discrete Fourier 
Transform,
Image Processing On Line, 7 (2017), pp. 115–130.
https://doi.org/10.5201/ipol.2017.184


Abstract
The bilateral filter is a popular non-linear smoother that has 
applications in image processing, computer vision, and computational 
photography. The novelty of the filter is that a range kernel is used in 
tandem with a spatial kernel for performing edge-preserving smoothing, 
where both kernels are usually Gaussian. A direct implementation of the 
bilateral filter is computationally expensive, and several fast 
approximations have been proposed to address this problem. In 
particular, it was recently demonstrated in a series of papers that a 
fast and accurate approximation of the bilateral filter can be obtained 
by approximating the Gaussian range kernel using polynomials and 
trigonometric functions. By adopting some of the ideas from this line of 
work, we propose a fast algorithm based on the discrete Fourier 
transform of the samples of the range kernel. We develop a parallel C 
implementation of the resulting algorithm for Gaussian kernels, and 
analyze the effect of various extrinsic and intrinsic parameters on the 
approximation quality and the run time. A key component of the 
implementation are the recursive Gaussian filters of Deriche and Young.