A new class of edge-preserving smoothing filters

A new class of edge-preserving noise-cleaning filters are introduced which use both spatial and nearest-neighbor constraints on image pixels to smooth an image. They are simple, fast and good at preserving edges and thin structural details in images. Edges and corners of varying contrasts that may be present in real images have been simulated in synthesized random checkerboards. The performance of the new smoothing filters on the blurred and noisy checkerboards has been quantitatively compared with that of four other filters.