The bilateral filter is technique to smooth images while preserving edges.
- Its formulation is simple: each pixel is replaced by an average of its neighbors. This aspect is important because it makes it easy to acquire intuition about its behavior, to adapt it to application-specific requirements, and to implement it.
- It depends only on two parameters that indicate the size and contrast of the features to preserve.
- It can be used in a non-iterative manner. This makes the parameters easy to set since their effect is not cumulative over several iterations.
- It can be computed at interactive speed even on large images thanks to efficient numerical schemes and even in real time if graphics hardware is available.