  A novel, fast and practical way of enhancing images is introduced in this
paper. Our approach builds on Laplacian operators of well-known edge-aware
kernels, such as bilateral and nonlocal means, and extends these filter's
capabilities to perform more effective and fast image smoothing, sharpening and
tone manipulation. We propose an approximation of the Laplacian, which does not
require normalization of the kernel weights. Multiple Laplacians of the
affinity weights endow our method with progressive detail decomposition of the
input image from fine to coarse scale. These image components are blended by a
structure mask, which avoids noise/artifact magnification or detail loss in the
output image. Contributions of the proposed method to existing image editing
tools are: (1) Low computational and memory requirements, making it appropriate
for mobile device implementations (e.g. as a finish step in a camera pipeline),
(2) A range of filtering applications from detail enhancement to denoising with
only a few control parameters, enabling the user to apply a combination of
various (and even opposite) filtering effects.
