Nonlinear diffusion and image contour enhancement (Q1430452)

The paper is devoted to the behavior of the solutions of some nonlinear degenerate parabolic equations with moving boundaries. These equations appear in describing the technique of contour enhancement in image processing. The unknown function is the image intensity. The nonlinearity is created by the law relating the image intensity flux to the image intensity. For a suitable choice of this nonlinearity there appears an effect of enhancement of image edges [see \textit{P. Perona} and \textit{J. Malik}, Scale space and edge detection using anisotropic diffusion. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Machine Intelligence 12, 629--639 (1990)]. In the paper the authors establish the well-posedness of a free-boundary problem that represents the model for image contour enhancement. The asymptotic behavior and its rates are studied. The results apply to a large class of nonlinear degenerate parabolic equations. The solutions are classified. The results are illustrated by some numerical experiments.