Lcis

High contrast scenes are difficult to depict on low contrast displays without loss of important fine details and textures. Skilled artists preserve these details by drawing scene contents in coarseto-fine order using a hierarchy of scene boundaries and shadings. We build a similar hierarchy using multiple instances of a new low curvature image simplifier (LCIS), a partial differential equation inspired by anisotropic diffusion. Each LCIS reduces the scene to many smooth regions that are bounded by sharp gradient discontinuities, and a single parameter K chosen for each LCIS controls region size and boundary complexity. With a few chosen K values K1 K 2 K 3 ::: LCIS makes a set of progressively simpler images, and image differences form a hierarchy of increasingly important details, boundaries and large features.