Structure-Aware Window Optimization for Texture Filtering

Texture filtering seeks to smooth out textured details in order to present structures prominently. To filter out multi-scale textured details while preserving structures, some methods propose to adjust the size of the filtering windows by handling the pixels near structures with small windows and the other pixels with large windows. Unfortunately, their adjustment measures are not very effective in treating complex situations. They may handle the pixels inside small structures with large windows, which overly smooths them, or they may be incapable of smoothing out large-scale textures. With regard to this, in this paper, we present a novel method that adjusts the window size for a pixel by checking similar pixels in its neighborhood. In general, pixels nearer structures have fewer similar pixels in their neighborhoods than the pixels that are farther away from structures. Thus, our adjustment can adaptively adjust window sizes by the distances from pixels to structures, which improves the potential to treat complex situations. The experimental results show that we can well filter out very large-scale textures while preserving small structures with high quality in a manner superior to the state-of-the-art methods. In addition, our method is very simple and efficient, and can be used easily in applications.