Optimized Fourier Bilateral Filtering

Abstract: We consider the problem of approximating a truncated Gaussian kernel using Fourier (trigonometric) functions. The computation-intensive bilateral filter can be expressed using fast convolutions by applying such an approximation to its range kernel, where the truncation in question is the dynamic range of the input image. The error from such an approximation depends on the period, the number of sinusoids, and the coefficient of each sinusoid. For a fixed period, we recently proposed a model for optimizing the coefficients using least-squares fitting. Following the Compressive Bilateral Filter (CBF), we demonstrate that the approximation can be improved by taking the period into account during the optimization. The accuracy of the resulting filtering is found to be at least as good as CBF, but significantly better for certain cases. The proposed approximation can also be used for non-Gaussian kernels, and it comes with guarantees on the filtering accuracy.