Periodic Plus Smooth Image Decomposition

When the Discrete Fourier Transform of an image is computed, the image is implicitly assumed to be periodic. Since there is no reason for opposite borders to be alike, the “periodic” image generally presents strong discontinuities across the frame border. These edge effects cause several artifacts in the Fourier Transform, in particular a well-known “cross” structure made of high energy coefficients along the axes, which can have strong consequences on image processing or image analysis techniques based on the image spectrum (including interpolation, texture analysis, image quality assessment, etc.). In this paper, we show that an image can be decomposed into a sum of a “periodic component” and a “smooth component”, which brings a simple and computationally efficient answer to this problem. We discuss the interest of such a decomposition on several applications.