Fast smoothed shock filtering

Shock filters and related tools, like coherence-enhancing filters, are popular methods for denoising and creating artistic effects. They iteratively apply morphological operators with a constant structuring element. We propose in this article to improve the original shock filtering scheme using smoothed local histograms. Our method exhibits better performance and control of the erosion and dilation operators and serves as an easily-controlled and fast denoising algorithm, in comparison with other shock filters in the literature. We also show application of our method for water-colorization and medical image segmentation.