Multi-scale selective image texture smoothing via intuitive single clicks

Existing texture filtering techniques acquiesce in the removal of all undesired background texture patterns simultaneously, and lead to the disappearance of small-scale foreground structures. Differently, this paper considers both multi-scale structures and specified texture patterns within an image as significant image contents, and presents a content-aware texture filtering approach via an easy-to-use interactive interface, named intuitive single click. The user’s effort on content-aware texture filtering is reduced to only locating a single click, where it is intuitively considered as one type of texture patterns. This simple interface is made possible by first generating three-scale intermediate filtered images (i.e., high, medium and low) and then performing breadth-first search (BFS) to identify one or more texture regions. Specifically, we utilize BFS to purify image edges in the medium-scale filtered image, on top of which a mask representing texture and non-texture regions is abstracted through the intuitive single-click texture locating and BFS. The mask is applied to effectively maintain multi-scale structures in the low-scale filtered image, and guides to fully smooth textures in the high-scale filtered image. Finally, a clean image is yielded by simply synthesizing the results of two mask operations in the low- and high-scale filtered images. We illustrate by extensive experiments that our approach advances the state-of-the-arts in terms of both the image cleanness and content-preserving ability. Our code is publicly available.