Fast and Effective L0 Gradient Minimization by Region Fusion

Abstract

L_0 gradient minimization can be applied to an input signal to control the number of non-zero gradients. This is useful in reducing small gradients generally associated with signal noise, while preserving important signal features. In computer vision, L_0 gradient minimization has found applications in image denoising, 3D mesh denoising, and image enhancement. Minimizing the L_0 norm, however, is an NP-hard problem because of its non-convex property. As a result, existing methods rely on approximation strategies to perform the minimization. In this paper, we present a new method to perform L_0 gradient minimization that is fast and effective. Our method uses a descent approach based on region fusion that converges faster than other methods while providing a better approximation of the optimal L_0 norm. In addition, our method can be applied to both 2D images and 3D mesh topologies. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated on a number of examples.

Publications:


C++ Code

Please download the newest version C++ code from here. In this new version, a local return pointer bug is fixed for the 3D mesh denoising. We thanks Evgeny Levinkov from the Max Planck Institute of Informatics, Germany for helping us point it out.


People

Rang NGUYENnguyenho at comp.nus.edu.sg
Michael S. BROWNbrown at comp.nus.edu.sg

Last updated: 10 March 2016