A new image smoothing method based on a simple model of spatial processing in the early stages of human vision

The difficulty of preserving edges is central to the problem of smoothing images. The main problem is that of distinguishing between meaningful contours and noise, so that the image can be smoothed without loss of details. Substantial efforts have been devoted to solving this difficult problem, and a plethora of filtering methods have been proposed in the literature. Non-linear filters have proved to be more efficient than their linear counterparts. Here, a new nonlinear filter for noise smoothing is introduced. This filter is based on the psychophysical phenomenon of human visual contrast sensitivity. Results on real images are presented to demonstrate the validity of our approach compared to other known filtering methods.