Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 August 2002
This paper describes a compact perceptual image model intended formorphologicalrepresentation of the visual information contained innatural images. We explain why the total variation can be a criterionto split the information between the two main visual structures, whichare the sketch and the microtextures. We deduce a morphological decompositionscheme, based on a segmentation where the borders of the regions correspondto the location of the topological singularities of a topographic map.This leads to propose a new and morphological definition of edges. The sketch is computed by approximating the image with a piecewise smoothnon-oscillating function, using a Lipshitz interpolant given as the solutionof a PDE. The data needed to reconstruct the sketch image are very compact,so that an immediate outcome of this image model is the design of a progressive, and artifact-free, image compression scheme.