The ability of blurring details while preserving salient edges is valuable for many image processing applications. We propose an extrema interpolation formulation for edge-aware smoothing, in which the extrema of the sought signal are fixed. A set of extrema cannot determine a unique signal, so the final smoothing result is the one that has the least distance with the original signal. Our method can follow significant edges more closely, as can be understood intuitively from the standpoint of monotonic approximation. Experimental results on one- and two-dimensional signals validate the distinctive effects of our method. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for image detail enhancement and image abstraction.
['Xiaolei Jiang', 'Hongxun Yao', 'Sicheng Zhao']
Edge-Respecting Image Smoothing via Extrema Interpolation