J. Weickert,
Coherence-enhancing diffusion of colour images,
Image and Vision Computing, Vol. 17, 201-212, 1999.
Many image processing problems require the enhancement of
coherent flow-like structures. This can be accomplished
in a natural way by combining anisotropic diffusion filtering and
texture analysis by means of the structure tensor (second-moment
matrix, interest operator). In this paper an extension of these
ideas to vector-valued images is presented. A structure tensor for
vector-valued images is constructed as the mean of the structure
tensors of each channel. This idea generalizes Di Zenzo's gradient
for colour images by introducing an additional integration scale.
The common structure tensor is used for steering the diffusion
processes in each channel. The additional integration scale turns
out to be crucial for orientation smoothing and it leads to
significantly improved filter results. After analysing the role
of all filter parameters, examples from different application
areas are presented, and it its demonstrated that this type
of diffusion filtering is highly robust under additive Gaussian
noise.
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Joachim.Weickert@ti.uni-mannheim.de.
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