Adaptive Bilateral Filtering and Its Application in Retinex Image Enhancement

Bilateral filtering has the advantage of keeping the edge well in image smoothing, but the selection of its parameters is difficult. In this paper, we propose an adaptive parameter estimation method for bilateral filtering, by estimating the noise variance automatically through image wavelet decomposition. When adaptive bilateral filtering method is used in Retinex image enhancement, it can either remove image noise or avoid the halo artifacts. The experimental results show that our method is effective.