L0 Gradient-Regularization and Scale Space Representation Model for Cartoon and Texture Decomposition.

Abstract

In this paper, we consider decomposing an image into its cartoon and texture components. Traditional methods, which mainly rely on the gradient amplitude of images to distinguish between these components, often show limitations in decomposing small-scale, high-contrast texture patterns and large-scale, low-contrast structural components. Specifically, these methods tend to decompose the former to the cartoon image and the latter to the texture image, neglecting the scale features inherent in both components. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a new variational model which incorporates an L0-based total variation norm for the cartoon component and an L2 norm for the scale space representation of the texture component. We show that the texture component has a small L2 norm in the scale space representation. We apply a quadratic penalty function to handle the non-separable L0 norm minimization problem. Numerical experiments are given to illustrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach.