Color persistent anisotropic diffusion of images

Abstract

Techniques from the theory of partial differential equations are often used to design filter methods that are locally adapted to the image structure. These techniques are usually used in the investigation of gray-value images. The extension to color images is non-trivial, where the choice of an appropriate color space is crucial. The RGB color space is often used although it is known that the space of human color perception is best described in terms of non-euclidean geometry, which is fundamentally different from the structure of the RGB space. Instead of the standard RGB space, we use a simple color transformation based on the theory of finite groups. It is shown that this transformation reduces the color artifacts originating from the diffusion processes on RGB images. The developed algorithm is evaluated on a set of real-world images, and it is shown that our approach exhibits fewer color artifacts compared to state-of-the-art techniques. Also, our approach preserves details in the image for a larger number of iterations. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.