We present a simple but effective technique to smooth out textures while preserving the prominent structures. Our method is built upon a key observation---the coarsest level in a Gaussian pyramid often naturally eliminates textures and summarizes the main image structures. This inspires our central idea for texture filtering, which is to progressively upsample the very low-resolution coarsest Gaussian pyramid level to a full-resolution texture smoothing result with well-preserved structures, under the guidance of each fine-scale Gaussian pyramid level and its associated Laplacian pyramid level. We show that our approach is effective to separate structure from texture of different scales, local contrasts, and forms, without degrading structures or introducing visual artifacts. We also demonstrate the applicability of our method on various applications including detail enhancement, image abstraction, HDR tone mapping, inverse halftoning, and LDR image enhancement. Code is available at https://rewindl.github.io/pyramid_texture_filtering/.

Recent methods on image denoising have achieved remarkable progress, benefiting mostly from supervised learning on massive noisy/clean image pairs and unsupervised learning on external noisy images. However, due to the domain gap between the training and testing images, these methods typically have limited applicability on unseen images. Although several attempts have been made to avoid the domain gap issue by learning denoising from singe noisy image itself, they are less effective in handling real‐world noise because of assuming the noise corruptions are independent and zero mean. In this paper, we go step further beyond prior work by presenting a novel unsupervised image denoising framework trained from single noisy image without making any explicit assumptions on the noise statistics. Our approach is built upon the deep image prior (DIP), which enables diverse image restoration tasks. However, as is, the denoising performance of DIP will significantly deteriorate on nonzero‐mean noise and is sensitive to the number of iterations. To overcome this problem, we propose to utilize multi‐scale deep image prior by imposing DIP across different image scales under the constraint of a scale consistency. Experiments on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that our method performs favorably against the state‐of‐the‐art methods for image denoising.