A Geodesic Forest is a new representation of digital color images

which yields flexible and efficient editing algorithms.

In this paper an image is decomposed into a collection of trees

(a forest) whose branches follow directions of minimum variation.

This representation enables expensive, 2D, edge-aware processing

to be cast as efficient one-dimensional operations along the tree

branches. Existing and novel contrast-sensitive editing tasks can

now be achieved by simple and effective algorithms acting on the

same tree-based image decomposition.

The contribution of this paper is three-fold: i) We introduce the

Geodesic Forests image representation which unifies a number of

previously diverse editing techniques; ii)We present a GPU-CUDA

algorithm for the efficient decomposition of an image into a complete

set of disjoint geodesic trees; iii) We describe a number of

simple algorithms to generate existing and new edge-aware image

and video effects.

The effectiveness of our algorithms is demonstrated with a number

of applications such as: texture flattening, ink painting, data-aware

resizing, diffusive painting and geodesic plotting. The high level

of parallelism of our algorithms enables them to be applied interactively

to high-resolution images (∼ 15Mpixel), and video data.

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Publisher  Microsoft Research

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