On the Effectiveness of Multiscale Mode Filters in Edge Preserving Image Filtering

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of the multiscale mode filters (MSMF) in edge preserving image smoothing tasks. The MSMF can be viewed as a generalization of the mean shift filters. Therefore, the performances of the MSMF are compared with the performances of the mean shift filters. The goal of the study is to identify image types where the MSMF can be used with better results and to quantify the gain obtained by this filter. Compared with the conventional mean shift filter, the MSMF is proven to be most effective in restoring images with blurred edges and high noise levels.