From high energy physics to low level vision

A geometric framework for image scale space, enhancement, and segmentation is presented. We consider intensity images as surfaces in the (x, I) space. The image is thereby a 2D surface in 3D space for gray level images, and a 2D surface in 5D for color images. The new formulation unifies many classical schemes and algorithms via a simple scaling of the intensity contrast, and results in new and efficient schemes. Extensions to multi dimensional signals become natural and lead to powerful denoising and scale space algorithms. Here, we demonstrate the proposed framework by applying it to denoise and improve gray level and color images.