A novel image decomposition approach and its applications

The current state-of-the-art edge-preserving decomposition techniques may not be able to fully separate textures while preserving edges. This may generate artifacts in some applications, e.g., edge detection, texture transfer, etc. To solve this problem, a novel image decomposition approach based on explicit texture separation from large scale components of an image is presented. We first apply a Gaussian structure-texture decomposition, to separate the majority of textures out of the input image. However, residual textures are still visible around the strong edges. To remove these residuals, an asymmetric sampling operator is proposed and followed by a joint bilateral correction to remove an excessive blur effect. We demonstrate that our approach is well suited for the tasks such as texture transfer, edge detection, non-photorealistic rendering, and tone mapping. The results show our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art image decomposition approaches.