Performance verification of the anisotropic diffusion technique for range image smoothing

Discontinuity preserving smoothing is very important for the reliable extraction of features such as edge maps and surface patches from range images. In this paper, we propose a modification of Perona and Malik's anisotropic diffusion algorithm for range image surface characterization. Perona and Malik's scheme has several practical and theoretical difficulties. The main difficulty arises when the signal is noisy. Since this introduces in theory unbounded oscillations of the gradient. Thus the conditional smoothing introduced by the model will not help. We propose a method which avoids the difficulty and use an efficient implicit scheme to solve the resulting partial differential equation. The proposed algorithm is robust in the presence of noise and is very useful for the segmentation of range images into surface patches and edge maps. A number of experimental results obtained by applying the algorithm on synthetic and real images are presented.