Filtering is arguably the single most important operation in image
and video processing. In particular, edge-preserving smoothing filters
are a fundamental building block for several applications [Fattal
2009; Farbman et al. 2010], having received considerable attention
from the research community over the last two decades. The most
popular filters in this class are anisotropic diffusion [Perona and
Malik 1990] and the bilateral filter [Tomasi and Manduchi 1998].
While anisotropic diffusion requires an iterative solver, bilateral filtering
uses a space-varying weighting function computed at a space