Fuzzy Edge Preserving Smoothing Filter Using Robust Region Growing

Smoothing, while preserving edges, has always been a major challenge in image processing. In this paper, we propose a new approach that uses segmentation in order to avoid inter-region smoothing thus preserving the edges. It is common to smooth the image prior to region growing. The opposite procedure does not work properly in the presence of noise since region growing is very noise sensitive. To overcome this difficulty we adapted a robust region growing algorithm. Since region growing is very resource consuming, we do not perform it for every pixel. Instead, we divide the image into a number of overlapping blocks for which we carry out the segmentation. Then, we use the results for some of the core pixels in that block. Now that the regions are known, we proceed to smooth each region by a fuzzy approach emphasizing the pixels residing in it. The performance of this filter is compared to that of the bilateral filter and it is shown that the new method generates superior results.