# Fast Guided Filter

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.00996 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00996/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 May 2015.

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [A Refreshed Similarity-based Upsampler for Direct High-Ratio Feature Upsampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02283/) (2024)
- [NAF: Zero-Shot Feature Upsampling via Neighborhood Attention Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.18452/) (2025)
- [Water Simulation and Rendering from a Still Photograph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02553/) (2022)
- [YOLO-Angio: An Algorithm for Coronary Anatomy Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15898/) (2023)
- [FS-Diff: Semantic guidance and clarity-aware simultaneous multimodal image fusion and super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09427/) (2025)
- [Deterministic Guided LiDAR Depth Map Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07256/) (2021)
- [MvKSR: Multi-view Knowledge-guided Scene Recovery for Hazy and Rainy Degradation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03800/) (2024)
- [Image Enhancement via Bilateral Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03888/) (2021)
- [A Machine Vision Method for Correction of Eccentric Error: Based on Adaptive Enhancement Algorithm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00514/) (2023)
- [Fast Local Neural Regression for Low-Cost, Path Traced Lambertian Global Illumination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11625/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Guided Upsampling for Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16623/) (2025)
- [ViT-Up: Faithful Feature Upsampling for Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14024/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The guided filter is a technique for edge-aware image filtering. Because of its nice visual quality, fast speed, and ease of implementation, the guided filter has witnessed various applications in real products, such as image editing apps in phones and stereo reconstruction, and has been included in official MATLAB and OpenCV. In this note, we remind that the guided filter can be simply sped up from O(N) time to O(N/s^2) time for a subsampling ratio s. In a variety of applications, this leads to a speedup of >10x with almost no visible degradation. We hope this acceleration will improve performance of current applications and further popularize this filter. Code is released.