Investigation of Guided Filtering for Image Processing Applications

Smoothing filters have significant importance for image processing applications and effective filtering techniques are thus developed for many operations such as image denoising, enhancement, and edge detection, etc. In this paper, the guided filtering scheme, which is a smoothing filter developed for such applications, is studied in detail. Several experiments performed on both gray-scale and color images show that the guided filter achieves better results than those of the bilateral filtering method, which is the most successful local filter in the literature.