Adaptive image smoothing based on robust estimation

Based on robust statistics, a novel edge preserving image smoothing algorithm was proposed. The problem of image filtering and smoothing was solved by robust estimation for piece-wise constant model, from which the scale adaptive robust filter was derived. To obtain the optimal scales of the robust filter, histogram analysis was adopted with nonparametric methods. This smoothing algorithm can preserve the structure information in the original image while smoothing it simultaneously. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the fixed scale smoothing algorithms.