Image Edge Restoring Filter

In computer vision, image processing and computer graphics, image smoothing filtering is a very basic and important task and to be expected possessing good edge-preserving smoothing property. Here we address the problem that the edge-preserving ability of many popular local smoothing filters needs to be improved. In this paper, we propose the image Edge Restoring Filter (ERF) to restore the blur edge pixels in the output of local smoothing filters to be clear. The proposed filter can been implemented after many local smoothing filter (such as Box filter, Gaussian filter, Bilateral Filter, Guided Filter and so on). The combinations of "original local smoothing filters + ERF" have better edge-preserving smoothing property than the original local smoothing filters. Experiments on image smoothing, image denoising and image enhancement demonstrate the excellent edges restoring ability of the proposed filter and good edgepreserving smoothing property of the combination "original local smoothing filters + ERF". The proposed filter would benefit a great variety of applications given that smoothing filtering is a high frequently used and fundamental operation.