Geometric Heat Equation and Nonlinear Diffusion of Shapes and Images

Visual tasks often require a hierarchical representation of shapes and images in scales ranging from coarse to fine. A variety of linear and nonlinear smoothing techniques, such as Gaussian smoothing, anisotropic diffusion, regularization, etc., have been proposed, leading to scalespace representations. We propose ageometricsmoothing method based on local curvature for shapes and images. The deformation by curvature, or the geometric heat equation, is a special case of thereaction–diffusionframework proposed in [41]. For shapes, the approach is analogous to the classical heat equation smoothing, but with a renormalization by arc-length at each infinitesimal step. For images, the smoothing is similar to anisotropic diffusion in that, since the component of diffusion in the direction of the brightness gradient is nil, edge location is left intact. Curvature deformation smoothing for shape has a number of desirable properties: it preserves inclusion order, annihilates extrema and inflection points without creating new ones, decreases total curvature, satisfies the semigroup property allowing for local iterative computations, etc. Curvature deformation smoothing of an image is based on viewing it as a collection of iso-intensity level sets, each of which is smoothed by curvature. The reassembly of these smoothed level sets into a smoothed image follows a number of mathematical properties; it is shown that the extension from smoothing shapes to smoothing images is mathematically sound due to a number of recent results [21]. A generalization of these results [14] justifies the extension of the entireentropy scale spacefor shapes [42] to one for images, where each iso-intensity level curve is deformed by a combination of constant and curvature deformation. The scheme has been implemented and is illustrated for several medical, aerial, and range images.