“…In the past decade, edge-preserving filtering such as the guided filter (GF) has proven to be effective in different image processing applications, for example in image smoothing/enhancement, image fusion [26], dehazing [27], image segmentation [28], saliency detection [29], etc. Theoretically, considering the spatial representation of a guidance image, GF is capable of transferring the intrinsic properties of the guidance image, especially its structures, to a filtered output, which can smooth the noise probabilities, but also preserve the real object boundary in the filtered image [30].…”