Edge-preserving smoothing of Perona-Malik nonlinear diffusion in two-dimensions

It has been thirty years since Perona and Malik (PM) introduced the nonlinear diffusion equation in image processing and analysis. The problem's complexity was to find a suitable and adaptive diffusion function that smooths away noise or textures while preserving sharp edges of a sufficiently smooth intensity. This paper provides a new two-dimensional analysis of the PM diffusion equation to examine its behavior during scales and an explicit formula to select the right diffusion function adequately. In this context, we study the PM equation at the zero crossings of the first and second directional derivatives of a sufficiently smooth function in the gradient direction.

Keywords:

Nonlinear PDE , Diffusion Function , Scale-Space , Edge-Detection , Image processing