Cartoonize an image using bilateral filtering

Posted by Avi Nehemiah, December 28, 2015

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Avi's pick of the week is Bilateral Filtering by Douglas Lanman. Bilateral filtering is an edge-preserving smoothing filter that can be used for a wide variety of image processing tasks such as de-noising and tone mapping, another fun application of a bilateral filter is to "cartoonize" an image. In his submission Douglas provides a helper function that shows how a bilateral filter can be used to turn an image into a cartoon version of itself.

Connect to a webcam
Read input image from webcam
Cartoonize image
Other edge-preserving filters

Connect to a webcam

Lets start by reading in an input image from a webcam using the webcam object in MATLAB. You can view the live stream using the preview function.

clear camera;
camera = webcam;
preview(camera)

Read input image from webcam

You then use the snapshot function to grab an input frame from the webcam.

inputImage = snapshot(camera);
figure;
imshow(inputImage);title('Input Image');

Convert image into cartoon version of itself

Now lets "cartoonize" the image with a bilateral filter. Notice how edges in the image are preserved by the bilateral filter.

cartoonImage = cartoon(im2double(inputImage));
figure;
subplot(1,2,1);
imshow(inputImage);
title('Original Image');
subplot(1,2,2);
imshow(cartoonImage);
title('Cartoon Image');