Distinguishing Structures from Textures by Patch-based Contrasts around Pixels for High-quality and Efficient Texture filtering

It is still challenging with existing methods to distinguish structures from texture details, and so preventing texture filtering. Considering that the textures on both sides of a structural edge always differ much from each other in appearances, we determine whether a pixel is on a structure edge by exploiting the appearance contrast between patches around the pixel, and further propose an efficient implementation method. We demonstrate that our proposed method is more effective than existing methods to distinguish structures from texture details, and our required patches for texture measurement can be smaller than the used patches in existing methods by at least half. Thus, we can improve texture filtering on both quality and efficiency, as shown by the experimental results, e.g., we can handle the textured images with a resolution of 800 × 600 pixels in real-time. (The code is available at https://github.com/hefengxiyulu/MLPC)