SBL mesh filter: Fast separable approximation of bilateral mesh filtering

Bilateral mesh filtering (BL) is a simple and powerful feature-preserving filtering operator which allows to smooth or remove noise from surface meshes while preserving important features in a non-iterative way. However, to be effective, such a filter may require quite a large support size, inducing slow processing when applied on high resolution meshes. In this paper, we propose a separable approximation of BL (SBL) based on a local decomposition of the bi-dimensional filter into a product of two one-dimensional ones. The main problem here is to find meaningful directions at every point to orient the two one-dimensional filters. Our solution exploits the minimum and maximum curvature directions at each point and demonstrates a significant speed-up on meshes ranging from thousands to millions of elements, enabling feature-preserving filtering with large support size in a variety of practical scenarii (Fig. 1).