Real Time Edge Detection of Objects in Pictures and Videos, without Artifacts

A New family of second-generation wavelets constructed using robust data-prediction lifting scheme

Highlights

• Almost every application for manipulating and improving photographic images, such as noise reduction and detail enhancement, relies on scale separation.
• Linear translation-invariant (LTI) filtering is the classic and efficient method for achieving scale separation; however the method generates visual artefacts such as halos.
• Edge-preserving smoothing filters avoid these artefacts but are computationally expensive, they are time-consuming and often increase memory requirements.
• The new wavelets accelerate the computation of the edge-preserving smoothing as well as various other popular applications (such as image colorization) at no memory cost.

Our Innovation

Family of second-generation wavelets constructed using robust data-prediction lifting schemes. The wavelets make it possible to compute nonlinear data-dependent multi-scale edge-preserving image filtering and processing at computation times which are linear in the number of image pixels.

Key Features

• Avoids halo artefacts in band-independent multi-scale processing with minimal computational cost and without taking any special precautions.
• Can be used to compute edge-aware interpolation schemes very efficiently, enabling real-time implementation of various applications such as image colorization
• Avoids the difficulties of solving large and poorly conditioned systems of equations
• Significantly accelerates various computational photography applications, achieving multi-scale data-dependent filtering at running times typical of linear translation-invariant (LTI) filtering.

The Opportunity

• The software is ready for incorporation into any image processing toolkit or video processing system to provide significantly faster results at reduced cost. It has particular benefits for:
• Edge-preserving smoothing of color images
• Edge-aware noise removal
• Dynamic-range compression
• Scattered data interpolation for image colorization

Project manager

Anna Pellivert
VP, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

Project researchers

Raanan Fattal
HUJI, School of Computer Science and Engineering
Computer Science