Image Smoothing via L0 Gradient Minimization

Li Xu     Cewu Lu     Yi Xu     Jiaya Jia

The Chinese Univeristy of Hong Kong

   

     

Abstract

We present a new image editing method, particularly effective for sharpening major edges by increasing the steepness of transitions while eliminating a manageable degree of low-amplitude structures. The seemingly contradictive effect is achieved in an unconventional optimization framework making use of L0 gradient minimization, which can globally control how many non-zero gradients are resulted to approximate prominent structures in a structure-sparsity-management manner. Unlike other edge-preserving smoothing approaches, our method does not depend on local features and globally locates important edges. It, as a fundamental tool, finds many applications and is particularly beneficial to edge extraction, clip-art JPEG artifact removal, and non-photorealistic image generation.

 

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Snapshot for paper "Image Smoothing via L0 Gradient Minimization"
Li Xu, Cewu Lu, Yi Xu, Jiaya Jia
ACM Transactions on Graphics, Vol. 30, No. 5 (SIGGRAPH Asia 2011), Dec 2011
   [Paper (pdf, 6.5MB)] [BibTeX]
  [Matlab Code]
[GPU Program with User Interface]
  [Presentation Slides]

Video