Local three-dimensional shape-preserving smoothing without shrinkage

Design of a novel three-dimensional (3D) shape-preserving smoothing approach is described. Three-dimensional surfaces are smoothed without shrinkage artifacts typical for many other approaches. Using our new representation of the 3D surface, the process of smoothing performs substantially faster than direct convolution in the spatial domain. The approach shows good smoothing results that preserve 3D shape. The design can be easily extended to n-dimensional filtering.