Two-level joint local Laplacian texture filtering

Extracting the structure component from an image with textures is a challenging problem in image processing. This paper presents a novel structurepreserving texture filtering approach based on the twolevel local Laplacian filter. The new method is developed by introducing local Laplacian filters into the joint filtering. Our study shows that local Laplacian filters can also be used for texture smoothing by defining a special remapping function, which is closely related to the joint bilateral filtering. This finding leads to a variant of the joint bilateral filter, we call it unnormal- ized joint bilateral lter, which produces smooth edges while preserving color variations. Our filter shares similar advantages with the joint bilateral filter, such as simple to implement and easy to understand. Experiments demonstrate that the new filter can produce satisfactory filtering results with the properties of texture smoothing, smooth edges, and edge shape-preserving. We compare our method with the state-of-the-art methods to demonstrate its improvements, and apply this filter to a variety of image editing applications.