Patent ID: 8111936

Claim:
A bilateral filtering system, the system comprising: an imaging device to take at least one input image, said input image is in the form of digital data indexed to represent the intensity Y({right arrow over (r)}) at a particular position {right arrow over (r)}=(x 1 , . . . ,x m ) (m≧1) in said image; a processor to calculate a corresponding second image X({right arrow over (r)}) using a bilateral filter of the form: X ⁡ ( r → ) = 1 v ⁡ ( r → ) ⁢ ∑ r → ′ ⁢ w ⁡ ( r → , r → ′ ) · Y ⁡ ( r → ′ ) ⁢ ⁢ v ⁡ ( r → ) = ∑ r → ′ ⁢ w ⁡ ( r → , r → ′ ) ⁢ ⁢ where ( Equation ⁢ ⁢ 1 ) w ⁡ ( r → , r → ′ ) = w s ⁡ ( r → - r → ′ ) · w ph ⁡ ( Y ⁡ ( r → ) - Y ⁡ ( r → ′ ) ) ( Equation ⁢ ⁢ 2 ) w s is a spatial component, w ph is a photometric component, and at least one of said components is in the form: w ⁡ ( t ) = w 0 + ∑ k = 1 n ⁢ ⁢ s k · w k ⁡ ( t ) ( Equation ⁢ ⁢ 5 ) w k ⁡ ( t ) = a k t ( Equation ⁢ ⁢ 6 ) where a k (k=1 . . . n), w 0 and s k (k=1 . . . n) are constants and t belongs to a window interval I=[−N 1 ,N 2 ], and to transmit said second image to a display; and a display unit to present said second image X({right arrow over (r)}).