An adaptive window mechanism for image smoothing

Image smoothing using adaptive windows whose shapes, sizes, and orientations vary with image structure is described. Window size is increased with decreasing gradient magnitude, and window shape and orientation are adjusted in such a way as to smooth most in the direction of least gradient. Rather than performing smoothing isotropically, smoothing is performed in preferred orientations to preserve region boundaries while reducing random noise within regions. Also, instead of performing smoothing uniformly, smoothing is performed more in homogeneous areas than in detailed areas. The proposed adaptive window mechanism is tested in the context of median, mean, and Gaussian filtering, and experimental results are presented using synthetic and real images and compared with a state-of-the-art method.