Image Structure Retrieval via L0 Minimization

Retrieving salient structure from textured images is an important but difficult problem in computer vision because texture, which can be irregular, anisotropic, non-uniform and complex, shares many of the same properties as structure. Observing that salient structure in a textured image should be piece-wise smooth, we present a method to retrieve such structures using an L0 minimization of a modified form of the relative total variation metric. Thanks to the characteristics shared by texture and small structures, our method is effective at retrieving structure based on scale as well. Our method outperforms state-of-art methods in texture removal as well as scale-space filtering. We also demonstrate our method’s ability in other applications such as edge detection, clip art compression artifact removal, and inverse half-toning.