Bilateral mesh filtering

The paper presents a new graph-based implementation of bilateral filtering. Based on the Laplacian mesh smoothing framework, the proposed filter mimics the behaviour of the classical mesh filter while retaining some of the interesting properties of mesh smoothing. The comparison between the filters is twofold. First of all, the two filters are benchmarked according to their ability to denoise complex synthetic image transitions. The respective performance of the filters are then assessed in a multiresolution denoising scheme for grayscale images, combining wavelet decomposition, shrinkage and bilateral filtering. The results obtained are encouraging and shows that the BMF is a viable alternative to classical bilateral filtering.

► We present a new graph-based image filter which mimics the behaviour of bilateral filtering. ► We detail the mathematical framework, focusing on the convergence of the method. ► We show that the performances of the proposed filter outperforms the bilateral filter on image denoising. ► We conclude that the proposed filter may be a viable alternative to the classical bilateral filter.