Adaptive support-window approximation to bilateral filtering

In this paper, a computation-efficient adaptive support-window scheme is proposed to approximate the conventional bilateral filtering. The difference is that the pixel-wise weights in bilateral filter are thresholded to be only 0 or 1. This results in an adaptive support window, depending on the local image structure of the anchor pixel. A cross-based algorithm is devised to achieve adaptive support window. Experiments show that both noise removal and edge-preserving can be also achieved using our proposed filter. By computing integral images during data aggregation, our algorithm is capable of achieving constant-time complexity regardless of the shape of the support window. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed computing scheme can reduce up to 98% of execution time with respect to the traditional bilateral filter.