Introducing maximal anisotropy into second order coupling models

Abstract

On the one hand, anisotropic diffusion is a well-established concept that has improved numerous computer vision approaches by permitting direction-dependent smoothing. On the other hand, recent applications have uncovered the importance of second order regularisation. The goal of this work is to combine the benefits of both worlds. To this end, we propose a second order regulariser that allows to penalise both jumps and kinks in a direction-dependent way. We start with an isotropic coupling model, and systematically introduce anisotropic concepts from first order approaches. We demonstrate the benefits of our model by experiments, and apply it to improve an existing focus fusion method.