Anisotropic diffusion of multivalued images with applications to color filtering

A general framework for anisotropic diffusion of multivalued images is presented. We propose an evolution equation where, at each point in time, the directions and magnitudes of the maximal and minimal rate of change in the vector-image are first evaluated. These are given by eigenvectors and eigenvalues of the first fundamental form in the given image metric. Then, the image diffuses via a system of coupled differential equations in the direction of minimal change. The diffusion ''strength'' is controlled by a function that measures the degree of dissimilarity between the eigenvalues. We apply the proposed framework to the filtering of color images represented in CIE-L*a*b* space.