Edge is the key information in the process of image smoothing. Some edges, especially the weak edges, are difficult to maintain, which result in the local area being over-smoothed. For the protection of weak edges, we propose an image smoothing algorithm based on global sparse structure and parameter adaptation. The algorithm decomposes the image into high frequency and low frequency part based on global sparse structure. The low frequency part contains less texture information which is relatively easy to smoothen. The high frequency part is more sensitive to edge information so it is more suitable for the selection of smoothing parameters. To reduce the computational complexity and improve the effect, we propose a bicubic polynomial fitting method to fit all the sample values into a surface. Finally, we use Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) to unify the whole algorithm and obtain the smoothed results by iterative optimization. Compared with traditional methods and deep learning methods, as well as the application tasks of edge extraction, image abstraction, pseudo-boundary removal, and image enhancement, it shows that our algorithm can preserve the local weak edge of the image more effectively, and the visual effect of smoothed results is better.

Smoothing images, especially with rich texture, is an important problem in computer vision. Obtaining an ideal result is difficult due to complexity, irregularity, and anisotropicity of the texture. Besides, some properties are shared by the texture and the structure in an image. It is a hard compromise to retain structure and simultaneously remove texture. To create an ideal algorithm for image smoothing, we face three problems. For images with rich textures, the smoothing effect should be enhanced. We should overcome inconsistency of smoothing results in different parts of the image. It is necessary to create a method to evaluate the smoothing effect. We apply texture pre-removal based on global sparse decomposition with a variable smoothing parameter to solve the first two problems. A parametric surface constructed by an improved Bessel method is used to determine the smoothing parameter. Three evaluation measures: edge integrity rate, texture removal rate, and gradient value distribution are proposed to cope with the third problem. We use the alternating direction method of multipliers to complete the whole algorithm and obtain the results. Experiments show that our algorithm is better than existing algorithms both visually and quantitatively. We also demonstrate our method’s ability in other applications such as clip-art compression artifact removal and content-aware image manipulation.

Image smoothing is a crucial image processing topic and has wide applications. For images with rich texture, most of the existing image smoothing methods are difficult to obtain significant texture removal performance because texture containing obvious edges and large gradient changes is easy to be preserved as the main edges. In this paper, we propose a novel framework (DSHFG) for image smoothing combined with the constraint of sparse high frequency gradient for texture images. First, we decompose the image into two components: a smooth component (constant component) and a non-smooth (high frequency) component. Second, we remove the non-smooth component containing high frequency gradient and smooth the other component combining with the constraint of sparse high frequency gradient. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed method is more competitive on efficiently texture removing than the state-of-the-art methods. What is more, our approach has a variety of applications including edge detection, detail magnification, image abstraction, and image composition.

Example-based super-resolution algorithms, which predict unknown high-resolution image information using a relationship model learnt from known high- and low-resolution image pairs, have attracted considerable interest in the field of image processing. In this paper, we propose a multi-example feature-constrained back-projection method for image super-resolution. Firstly, we take advantage of a feature-constrained polynomial interpolation method to enlarge the low-resolution image. Next, we consider low-frequency images of different resolutions to provide an example pair. Then, we use adaptive $k$NN search to find similar patches in the low-resolution image for every image patch in the high-resolution low-frequency image, leading to a regression model between similar patches to be learnt. The learnt model is applied to the low-resolution high-frequency image to produce high-resolution high-frequency information. An iterative back-projection algorithm is used as the final step to determine the final high-resolution image. Experimental results demonstrate that our method improves the visual quality of the high-resolution image.

This paper proposes a new algorithm based on low-rank matrix recovery to remove salt & pepper noise from surveillance video. Unlike single image denoising techniques, noise removal from video sequences aims to utilize both temporal and spatial information. By grouping neighboring frames based on similarities of the whole images in the temporal domain, we formulate the problem of removing salt & pepper noise from a video tracking sequence as a low-rank matrix recovery problem. The resulting nuclear norm and L1-norm related minimization problems can be efficiently solved by many recently developed methods. To determine the low-rank matrix, we use an averaging method based on other similar images. Our method can not only remove noise but also preserve edges and details. The performance of our proposed approach compares favorably to that of existing algorithms and gives better PSNR and SSIM results.