How to implement smoothing in frequency domain?

Question

I want to do smoothing to an image in the frequency domain. when i use google to see any articles it gave some Matlab codes which i don't need. i could do FFT to an image but i don't know how to implement any smoothing techniques(ILPF, BLPF, IHPF, BHPF) in frequency domain. if you can provide any code samples for any of the above techniques WITHOUT using any image processing libraries it will be really helpful and C# is preferred.

Thanks,

Answer 1

Could you define what you mean by 'smoothing in the frequency domain'? You can generate a spectrum image using FFT and multiply the image by some function to attenuate particular frequencies, then convert the spectrum back to an image using the inverse-FFT. However, for this kind of filtering (multiplication by some scaling function in frequency), you can achieve the same result more quickly by convolving with the dual function in the spatial domain.

In any case, if you wish to implement this yourself, read up on FFT (the fast Fourier transform) and convolution. You might also check out a signal processing textbook, if you're interested, as the theory behind discrete filtering is fairly deep. The algorithms won't make a whole lot of sense without that theory, though you can certainly apply them without understanding them.

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If you want to implement your own DSP algorithms, check out this book online. In particular, Ch 33 describes the math and algorithm behind Butterworth filter design. Ch 12 describes how to implement FFT.

Answer 2

There is a great series on Code Project by Christian Graus which you might find useful, especially part 2 which deals amongst others with smoothing filters:

Image Processing for Dummies with C# and GDI+ Part 1 - Per Pixel Filters
Image Processing for Dummies with C# and GDI+ Part 2 - Convolution Filters
Image Processing for Dummies with C# and GDI+ Part 3 - Edge Detection Filters
Image Processing for Dummies with C# and GDI+ Part 4 - Bilinear Filters and Resizing
Image Processing for Dummies with C# and GDI+ Part 5 - Displacement filters, including swirl
Image Processing for Dummies with C# and GDI+ Part 6 - The HSL color space

Answer 3

Keshan, it is simple. Imagine the FFT is another two pictures where low frequencies lie in the middle and high frequencies away from the middle. If the pixels are numbered from -w/2 to w/2 and -h/2 to h/2 you can simply measure the distance from the middle as a(x,y)=sqrt(x^2+y^2). Then take some arbitrary monotonic decreasing function like f(x)=1/(1+x) and multiply each point in the fft with f(a(x,y)). Then transform back using the FFT.

There are different choices for f(x) which will look different. For example a gaussian function or bessel or whatever. I did this for my undergrad and it was great fun. If you send me a mail I will send you my program :-).

One bit caveat is the ordering in output of the fft. The arrays it generates can be ordered in weird ways. It is important that you find out which array index corresponds to which x/y-position in the "analytical" fourier transform!

Answer 4

For all image/signal processing I recommend OpenCV.

This has a managed C# wrapper: Emgu.

http://www.emgu.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page