The Fast Bilateral Solver

Jonathan T. Barron, Ben Poole

Abstract: We present the bilateral solver, a novel algorithm for edge-aware smoothing that combines the flexibility and speed of simple filtering approaches with the accuracy of domain-specific optimization algorithms. Our technique is capable of matching or improving upon state-of-the-art results on several different computer vision tasks (stereo, depth superresolution, colorization, and semantic segmentation) while being 10–1000 $$\times $$ faster than baseline techniques with comparable accuracy, and producing lower-error output than techniques with comparable runtimes. The bilateral solver is fast, robust, straightforward to generalize to new domains, and simple to integrate into deep learning pipelines.