Bilateral Filtering: Theory and Applications

The bilateral filter is a non-linear technique that can blur an image while respecting strong edges. Its ability to decompose an image into different scales without causing haloes after modification has made it ubiquitous in computational photography applications such as tone mapping, style transfer, relighting, and denoising. This text provides a graphical, intuitive introduction to bilateral filtering, a practical guide for efficient implementation and an overview of its numerous applications, as well as mathematical analysis.