Section: New Results
Fast Multi-Scale Detail Decomposition via Accelerated Iterative Shrinkage
Participants : Hicham Badri [correspondant], Hussein Yahia, Driss Aboutajdine.
Edge-aware smoothing is one of the most important operations in computer graphics and vision. It is the building-block for a wide range of applications including : smoothing, detail manipulation, HDR tone-mapping, to cite a few. However, good quality edge-aware smoothing operators are relatively slow. We present a fast solution for performing high-quality edge-aware smoothing, particularly efficient for edge manipulation applications. Our strategy to perform smoothing consists in using a half-quadratic solver with a non-convex sparsity-inducing norm, accelerated using a first order approximation. First, we show how to solve optimization problems with complex non-convex norms using a first order proximal estimation. This step is of paramount importance not just for smoothing, but for many applications requiring the use non-convex norms. Secondly, we design two norms inspired by natural image statistics. We incorporate these norms with a first order proximal estimation to design the main smoothing operator. Finally, we propose a warm-start solution to accelerate the solver. Experiments show that our method produces high quality results, sometimes better than some state-of-the-art methods, with reduced processing time. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach on various applications such as smoothing, multi-scale detail manipulation of low and high dynamic range images as well as high definition video manipulation. See figure 8 .
Work presented at SIGGRAPH Asia 2013 (technical brief), Hong Kong [24] .