Is there a way to simulate a "Bilateral blur"?

[F-Burning]

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Adobe has a type of blur called bilateral blur, which allows you to soften the areas of an image, but respecting the edges, giving a result like watercolor, like in this example:

Here is the picture without the effect:

If I'm not mistaken, this type of blur is not found in the program, and I was wondering if there was a way to emulate it.

[Bracket-H]

There are many shortcomings in the compositing it seems...perhaps OT, now that it is not confined to its original venue of application anymore, should perhaps outsource these things elsewhere.

Like Blender, or Natron, etc.
I am of the opinion that there lays one of the biggest strength of free and open source software.
There should be no fear of outsourcing an aspect to a dedicated tool since it's ...well, free, libre, etc.

Now, this leaves the question of 'animated columns' but...that is resolved in the output.
Like, if you have a level that is larger than the viewport, and you have an animated camera in there that pans or zooms along that level.
Then, well, the rendered output file will be correctly cropped because the viewport is constricted, and would be cropped in the output of OT as well, at the end of the pipeline.

So you could still render an entire cut with OT, but simply without effects, but exported as a compositor friendly format, either exported in dedicated layers, or as an exr file.

But ...perhaps that is something that DWANGO or Ghibli won't want.
Would be nice, though, to have OT file format support in other toolkits.

Natron for example integrates with GMIC easily, and it would perhaps give Natron some attention, too.

Ah well. Not up to me I suppose, unless I'd fork it but I do not have the skills to maintain such a project.

As for your actual question, well, you could do what I just suggested, but yourself.
Render the stuff you need adjusted, and apply the effect in another program, and then reimport the footage into OT.

An example (I have not fully vetted...so, yeah, but he probably has the parralel render tasks set to high, choking the computer, it should not be this slow)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfCbjk3h3cw

[RodneyBaker]

It might be pretty direct to implement a bilateral (blur) shader.
One example here: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4dfGDH

Interactive example: http://vcg.isti.cnr.it/Publications/2012/BCCS12/