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imguidedfilter

Guided filtering of images

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Syntax

B = imguidedfilter(A,G)
B = imguidedfilter(A)
B = imguidedfilter(___,Name,Value)

Description

B = imguidedfilter(A,G) filters binary, grayscale, or RGB image A using a filter guided by image G. For more information on guided filtering, see What is Guided Image Filtering?.

B = imguidedfilter(A) filters input image A under self-guidance, using A itself as the guidance image. This syntax can be used for edge-preserving smoothing of image A.

example

B = imguidedfilter(___,Name,Value) filters the image A using name-value arguments to control aspects of guided filtering.

Examples

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Open Live Script

Read and display an image.

A = imread("pout.tif");
imshow(A)

Figure contains an axes object. The hidden axes object contains an object of type image.

Smooth the image using imguidedfilter. In this syntax, imguidedfilter uses the image itself as the guidance image.

Iguided = imguidedfilter(A);

For comparison, smooth the original image using a Gaussian filter defined by imgaussfilt. Set the standard deviation of the filter to 2.5 so that the degree of smoothing approximately matches that of the guided filter.

Igaussian = imgaussfilt(A,2);

Display the result of guided filtering and the result of Gaussian filtering. Observe that the flat regions of the two filtered images, such as the jacket and the face, have similar amounts of smoothing. However, the guided filtered image better preserves the sharpness of edges, such as around the trellis and the collar of the white shirt.

montage({Iguided,Igaussian})

Figure contains an axes object. The hidden axes object contains an object of type image.

Input Arguments

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Image to be filtered, specified as a binary, grayscale, or RGB image.

Data Types: single | double | int8 | int16 | int32 | uint8 | uint16 | uint32 | logical

Guidance image, specified as a binary, grayscale, or RGB image of the same height and width as image A.

The guidance image can be the input image itself, a different version of the input image, or a completely different image. The output image is, locally, a linear transformation of the guidance image, where the function optimizes the weights of the linear transformation to minimize the error between the input and output images. For more information on applications of guided image filtering using different guidance images, see Perform Flash/No-flash Denoising with Guided Filter and Segment Thermographic Image After Edge-Preserving Filtering.

Data Types: single | double | int8 | int16 | int32 | uint8 | uint16 | uint32 | logical

Name-Value Arguments

Specify optional pairs of arguments as Name1=Value1,...,NameN=ValueN, where Name is the argument name and Value is the corresponding value. Name-value arguments must appear after other arguments, but the order of the pairs does not matter.

Example: Ismooth = imguidedfilter(A,NeighborhoodSize=[4 4]); performs guided filtering using a neighborhood of size 4-by-4 pixels.

Before R2021a, use commas to separate each name and value, and enclose Name in quotes.

Example: Ismooth = imguidedfilter(A,"NeighborhoodSize",[4 4]);

Size of the rectangular neighborhood around each pixel used in guided filtering, specified as a positive integer or a 2-element vector of positive integers. If you specify a scalar value, such as Q, then the neighborhood is a square of size [Q Q]. Do not specify a value greater than the size of the image.

Example: NeighborhoodSize=[7 7]

Data Types: single | double | int8 | int16 | int32 | int64 | uint8 | uint16 | uint32 | uint64

Amount of smoothing in the output image, specified as a positive number. If you specify a small value, only neighborhoods with small variance (uniform areas) will get smoothed and neighborhoods with larger variance (such as around edges) will not be smoothed. If you specify a larger value, high variance neighborhoods, such as stronger edges, will get smoothed in addition to the relatively uniform neighborhoods. Start with the default value, check the results, and adjust the default up or down to achieve the effect you desire.

If you specify a guidance image G, then the default value of DegreeOfSmoothing depends on the data type of G, and is calculated as 0.01*diff(getrangefromclass(G)).^2. For example, the default degree of smoothing is 650.25 for images of data type uint8, and the default is 0.01 for images of data type double with pixel values in the range [0, 1]. If you do not specify a guidance image, then the default value depends on the data type of image A.

Data Types: single | double | int8 | int16 | int32 | int64 | uint8 | uint16 | uint32 | uint64

Output Arguments

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Filtered image, returned as a numeric array of the same size and data type as A

Tips

  • The DegreeOfSmoothing argument specifies a soft threshold on variance for the given neighborhood. If a pixel's neighborhood has variance much lower than the threshold, it will see some amount of smoothing. If a pixel's neighborhood has variance much higher than the threshold it will have little to no smoothing.

  • Input images A and G can be of different classes. If either A or G is of class integer or logical, then imguidedfilter converts them to floating-point precision for internal computation.

  • Input images A and G can have different number of channels.

    • If both A and G are RGB images, then imguidedfilter filters each channel of A independently using the corresponding channel of G.

    • If A is an RGB image and G is a single-channel image, then imguidedfilter filters each channel of A independently using the same guidance image, G.

    • If A is a single-channel image and G is an RGB image, then imguidedfilter filters A using the combined color statistics of all the three channels of G.

References

[1] Kaiming He, Jian Sun, Xiaoou Tang. Guided Image Filtering. IEEE® Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Volume 35, Issue 6, pp. 1397-1409, June 2013.

Extended Capabilities

Version History

Introduced in R2014a

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See Also

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