Orientation Diffusion or How to Comb a Porcupine

This paper addresses the problem of feature enhancement in noisy images, when the feature is known to be constrained to a manifold. As an example, we approach the orientation denoising problem via the geometric Beltrami framework for image processing. The feature (orientation) field is represented accordingly as the embedding of a two dimensional surface in the spatial-feature manifold. The resulted Beltrami flow is a selective smoothing process that respects the feature constraint. Orientation diffusion is treated as a canonical example where the feature (orientation in this case) space is the unit circle S1. Applications to color analysis are discussed and numerical experiments demonstrate again the power of the Beltrami framework for nontrivial geometries in image processing. C © 2002 Elsevier Science (USA)