Image Smoothing Via L0 Gradient Minimization

We present a new image editing method,particularly effective for sharpening major edges by increasing the steepness of transition while eliminating a manageable degree of low-amplitude structures. The seemingly contradictive effect is achieved in an optimization framework making use of L0 gradient minimization,which can globally control how many non-zero gradients are resulted in to approximate prominent structure in a sparsity-control manner. Unlike other edge-preserving smoothing approaches,our method does not depend on local features,but instead globally locates important edges. It,as a fundamental tool,finds many applications and is particularly beneficial to edge extraction,clipart JPEG artifact removal,and non-photorealistic effect generation.