A Gentle Introduction
to Bilateral Filtering
and its Applications

Sylvain Paris, Pierre Kornprobst, Jack Tumblin, and Frédo Durand
A class at ACM SIGGRAPH 2008
A tutorial at IEEE CVPR 2008
A course at ACM SIGGRAPH 2007

Friday morning (8:30am - 12:15pm), August 15th 2008
Announcement on the SIGGRAPH'08 website

Saturday, June 28th 2008
Announcement on the CVPR'08 website

Past: Monday morning (8:30am - 12:15pm), August 6th 2007
Announcement on the SIGGRAPH'07 website

Summary The bilateral filter is ubiquitous in computational photography applications. It is increasingly common in computer graphics research papers but no single reference summarizes its properties and applications. This course provides a graphical, strongly intuitive introduction to bilateral filtering, and a practical guide for image editing, tone-maps, video processing and more.

Prerequisites We welcome all motivated beginners. Don't worry if integrals or Gaussian functions are unfamiliar: we only assume that attendees know some digital image basics (pixels, gray levels, noise) and have some modest programming experience. If you can compute a weighted average, then you are ready to take this course.

Intended Audience This course is meant to introduce a graphics person to bilateral filtering. We typically target someone who wants to get into image editing, computational photography, and other related fields. We cover issues that appeal to anyone interested in image manipulations: researchers, developers, software designers and more.

Course Material

• Course Notes •

Survey	We have published a survey that extends our original course notes.

Course notes (pdf, 49MB)	Includes a survey, an introduction to edge-preserving filters, and reprints of related SIGGRAPH articles.

• Slides •

Note: Prefer the PPT version if possible, the PDF export is not always faithful to the original.

ppt (3.9MB) pdf (0.8MB) 2008 (pdf, 4.4MB)	Introduction
ppt (1.0MB) pdf (0.4MB) 2008 (pdf, 1.1MB)	Naïve Image Smoothing: Gaussian Blur
ppt (15MB) pdf (2.1MB) 2008 (pdf, 7.9MB)	"Fixing the Gaussian Blur": the Bilateral Filter
ppt (10MB) pdf (29MB) 2008 (pdf, 17MB)	Applications
ppt (6.0MB) pdf (11MB) 2008 (pdf, 4.9MB)	How Does the Bilater Filter Relates with Other Methods?
ppt (2.1MB) pdf (1.1MB) 2008 (pdf, 3.5MB)	Efficient Implementations of the Bilateral Filter
ppt (11MB) pdf (1.0MB) 2008 (pdf, 1.6MB)	Novel Variants of the Bilateral Filter
ppt (7.3MB) pdf (4.3MB) 2008 (pdf, 6.3MB)	Applications: Advanced Uses of Bilateral Filters
ppt (8.3MB) pdf (9.7MB) 2008 (pdf, 7.4MB)	Limitation?
ppt (1.0MB) pdf (0.6MB) 2008 (pdf, 1.1MB)	Conclusions
ppt (82MB) pdf (25MB) 2008 (pdf, 51MB)	All slides in a big zip file

• Code •

Fast bilateral filter	Sylvain Paris provides C++ code and Jiawen Chen Matlab code.
CImg	This C++ library by David Tschumperlé provides the basic tools needed to implement image filters.

Links

• Related Courses •

Computational photography	SIGGRAPH'08 announcement, SIGGRAPH'07 announcement, course webpage.
Level set and PDE methods for computer graphics	SIGGRAPH'04 announcement, course notes.

• Other Resources •

Fast bilateral filtering	This webpage describes the work of Sylvain Paris and Frédo Durand. It includes their papers, code, and references.
Mathematical Problems in Image Processing	This book by Pierre Kornprobst and Gilles Aubert reviews and explains the mathematical ground supporting image processing using partial differential equations and related techniques, including the bilateral filter.