Quantitative error analysis of bilateral filtering

Abstract

One of the fastest acceleration techniques for bilateral image filtering is the real time $O(1)$ quantization method proposed by Yang 2009, which first computes some Principal Bilateral Filtered Image Components (PBFICs) and then applies linear interpolation to estimate the filtered output images. There is a trade-off between accuracy and efficiency in selecting the number of PBFICs: the more PBFICs are used, the higher the accuracy, and the higher the computational cost. A question arises: how many PBFICs are required to achieve a certain level of accuracy? In this letter, we address this question by investigating the properties of bilateral filtering and deriving the linear interpolation error bounds when only a subset of PBFICs is used. The provided theoretical analysis indicates that the necessary number of PBFICs for user-provided precision depends on the range kernel and, for typical Gaussian range kernels, a small percentage (typically less than 4%) of the PBFICs are enough for good approximations.