Separation Surfaces in the Spectral TV Domain for Texture Decomposition
This addresses texture decomposition for image processing applications, but appears incremental as it builds on the existing spectral TV framework.
The paper tackles the problem of separating textures with varying pattern size, contrast, or illumination in images by introducing separation surfaces in the spectral total-variation domain, enabling adaptive texture decomposition and manipulation.
In this paper we introduce a novel notion of separation surfaces for image decomposition. A surface is embedded in the spectral total-variation (TV) three dimensional domain and encodes a spatially-varying separation scale. The method allows good separation of textures with gradually varying pattern-size, pattern-contrast or illumination. The recently proposed total variation spectral framework is used to decompose the image into a continuum of textural scales. A desired texture, within a scale range, is found by fitting a surface to the local maximal responses in the spectral domain. A band above and below the surface, referred to as the \textit{Texture Stratum}, defines for each pixel the adaptive scale-range of the texture. Based on the decomposition an application is proposed which can attenuate or enhance textures in the image in a very natural and visually convincing manner.