Filtering is a core operation in low level computer vision. It is a preliminary process in many biomedical image processing applications. Bilateral filtering has been applied to smooth biomedical images while preserving the edges. However, to avoid over-smoothing structures of sizes comparable to the image resolutions, a narrow spatial window has to be used. This leads to the necessity of performing more iterations in the filtering process. In this paper, we propose a novel filtering technique

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... amely trilateral filter, which can achieve edge-preserving smoothing with a narrow spatial window in only a few iterations. The experimental results have shown that our novel method provides greater noise reduction than bilateral filtering and smooths biomedical images without over-smoothing ridges and shifting the edge locations, as compared to other noise reduction methods.