Optimization-based image smoothing is routinely formulated as the game between a smoothing energy and an appearance preservation energy. Achieving adequate smoothing is a fundamental goal of these image smoothing algorithms. We show that partially "erasing" the appearance preservation facilitate adequate image smoothing. In this paper, we call this manipulation as Erasing Appearance Preservation (EAP). We conduct an user study, allowing users to indicate the "erasing" positions by drawing scribbles interactively, to verify the correctness and effectiveness of EAP. We observe the characteristics of human-indicated "erasing" positions, and then formulate a simple and effective 0-1 knapsack to automatically synthesize the "erasing" positions. We test our synthesized erasing positions in a majority of image smoothing methods. Experimental results and large-scale perceptual human judgments show that the EAP solution tends to encourage the pattern separation or elimination capabilities of image smoothing algorithms. We further study the performance of the EAP solution in many image decomposition problems to decompose textures, shadows, and the challenging specular reflections. We also present examinations of diversiform image manipulation applications like texture removal, retexturing, intrinsic decomposition, layer extraction, recoloring, material manipulation, etc. Due to the widespread applicability of image smoothing, the EAP is also likely to be used in more image editing applications.

@InProceedings{EAP2020,
    author={Lvmin Zhang and Chengze Li and Yi JI and Chunping Liu and Tien-tsin Wong}, 
    booktitle={European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)}, 
    title={Erasing Appearance Preservation in Optimization-based Smoothing}, 
    year={2020}, 
    }