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Fast median and bilateral filtering

Published:01 July 2006Publication History
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Abstract

Median filtering is a cornerstone of modern image processing and is used extensively in smoothing and de-noising applications. The fastest commercial implementations (e.g. in Adobe® Photoshop® CS2) exhibit O(r) runtime in the radius of the filter, which limits their usefulness in realtime or resolution-independent contexts. We introduce a CPU-based, vectorizable O(log r) algorithm for median filtering, to our knowledge the most efficient yet developed. Our algorithm extends to images of any bit-depth, and can also be adapted to perform bilateral filtering. On 8-bit data our median filter outperforms Photoshop's implementation by up to a factor of fifty.

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References

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                      cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics
                      ACM Transactions on Graphics  Volume 25, Issue 3
                      July 2006
                      742 pages
                      ISSN:0730-0301
                      EISSN:1557-7368
                      DOI:10.1145/1141911
                      Issue’s Table of Contents

                      Copyright © 2006 ACM

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                      Publication History

                      • Published: 1 July 2006
                      Published in tog Volume 25, Issue 3

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