  In image processing, it can be a useful pre-processing step to smooth away
small structures, such as noise or unimportant details, while retaining the
overall structure of the image by keeping edges, which separate objects, sharp.
Typically this edge-preserving smoothing process is achieved using edge-aware
filters. However such filters may preserve unwanted small structures as well if
they contain edges. In this work we present a novel framework for
edge-preserving smoothing which separates the process into two different steps:
First the image is smoothed using a blurring filter and in the second step the
important edges are restored using a guided edge-aware filter. The presented
method proves to deliver very good results, compared to state-of-the-art
edge-preserving smoothing filters, especially at removing unwanted small
structures. Furthermore it is very versatile and can easily be adapted to
different fields of applications while at the same time being very fast to
compute and therefore well-suited for real time applications.
