A Fundamental Relationship between Bilateral Filtering, Adaptive Smoothing, and the Nonlinear Diffusion Equation

newspapers and past students' theses. These imaged documents will not be OCR'ed as originally planned due to the overwhelming cost involved. The images are available for public viewing and downloading. The present method will provide an automated means of retrieving similar document images from the library website without having to download every image for inspection of its content to decide its relevance. AbstractÐIn this paper, the relationship between bilateral filtering and anisotropic diffusion is examined. The bilateral filtering approach represents a large class of nonlinear digital image filters. We first explore the connection between anisotropic diffusion and adaptive smoothing, and then the connection between adaptive smoothing and bilateral filtering. Previously, adaptive smoothing was considered an inconsistent approximation to the nonlinear diffusion equation. We extend adaptive smoothing to make it consistent, thus enabling a unified viewpoint that relates between nonlinear digital image filters and the nonlinear diffusion equation.