Patent ID: 7102638

Claim:
A method for generating an image with de-emphasized textures, wherein each pixel in the image is classified as a silhouette edge pixel, a texture edge pixels, or a featureless pixel, comprising: acquiring an image; generating from the acquired image a mask image M(x, y), wherein an intensity of a given pixel (x, y) in the mask image M(x, y) is zero if the pixel (x, y) is classified as the texture edge pixel, is d(x, y) if the pixel (x, y) is classified as the featureless pixel, and is one if the pixel (x, y) is classified as the silhouette edge pixel; determining intensity gradient ∇I(x, y) in the masked image; integrating the intensity gradients in the masked image according to G(x, y)=∇I(x, y).M(x, y); constructing an output image I′ by minimizing |∇I′−G|; and normalizing intensities in the output image I′.