Analysis of the bilateral filter

Effective methods for image denoising are typically based on iterative and locally adaptive algorithms. Recently, an alternative algorithm called ´bilateral filter´ was proposed for the same task. This filter was shown to give similar and possibly better results compared to the ones obtained by the best iterative approaches. In this paper we present a relation between the bilateral filter and the Bayesian methodology. Based on this observation, we show how the bilateral filter can be improved and extended to treat more general signal characteristics.