Every year, CS123 students spend a couple weeks learning about image filtering in class before going off on their own to implement some basic filters, blurs and scaling algorithms. Signal processing can be tricky. It’s easy to get lost in the theory when you start talking about image sampling and reconstruction.

So, let’s see if we can put everything in perspective.

## Duals

Before we can dive into signal processing, we’re going to need a theoretical tool to help us talk about signals. That tool is the dual.

Think back to calculus. Consider a function $f(x)$, and its derivative $f’(x)$.

TODO graphs of a function and its derivative


When you take the derivative of a function, you get back another function. This derivative means something about the original function, but may look nothing like the original function at all. You can integrate the derivative to get back the original function.

If you change $f(x)$, you get back a different $f’(x)$. If you modify $f’(x)$, integrating gives you a different $f(x)$ than the original. The function and derivative seem to be tied to one another. You can think of them as duals of each other.

TODO graphs showing ramifications of modifications


Disclaimer: Although this example captures the main idea, it’s a bit of an oversimplification. The real definition of duality is a bit stronger: duality requires the same operation to transform someting into its dual and back. However, derivativation and integration are entirely different beasts.

## The Frequency Domain

So why are we talking about duals? Because we’ll find one duality particularly useful for image processing: the duality between the spatial and frequency domains. What are those?

It turns out every function can be represented as a sum of infinitely many sine waves. Specifically, if we took one sine wave for every possible frequency $f$, multiplied each by a different amplitude $a_f$, and summed all of those, we get back some function. By carefully choosing our values of $a_f$, we can exactly recreate any function this way.

In other words, every function $g(x)$ can be rewritten as follows:

Once this makes sense, we can define the difference between spatial and frequency domains:

• The spatial domain is how you’ve represented functions all your life. It’s also how we defined $g(x)$ above. In the spatial domain, functions take in an $X$ value and produce a $Y$ value. The $Y$ value denotes the height of the function above the axis at a given $X$ point.

• The frequency domain may be new. In the frequency domain, functions take in a frequency and produce the amplitude of the sine wave with that frequency. That is, the function takes an $f$ value and produces the corresponding $a_f$ value.

## Visualizing the Frequency Domain

Like regular (spatial domain) functions, frequency domain functions can be graphed. However, the axes of frequency graphs mean something different than the axes of spatial graphs.

Remember spatial domain functions take in an $X$ and produce a $Y$. Similarly, frequency domain functions take in an $f$ and produce an $a_f$. To graph spatial domain functions, we represent $X$ with a horizontal axis and $Y$ with a vertical axis.

Knowing that, how do you think we use the axes of a frequency graph?

• The horizontal axis represents frequency
• The vertical axis represents amplitude

So each point on the frequency graph specifies the frequency and amplitude of one of the infinitely many sine waves.

Let’s try some examples. Consider $g(x)$, a spatial function consisting of a simple sine wave:

TODO graph of a simple sine wave


The frequency graph of $g(x)$ looks like this:

TODO line at y = 0, single point at (f, a_f)


Notice the horizontal line at $y = 0$. The amplitude of every sine wave, except one, is 0. So none of these sine waves contributes to the sum that produces $g(x)$.

However, the point at $(f, a_f)$ specifies the sine wave with frequency $f$ has amplitude $a_f$. So if we transform this frequency graph back into the spatial domain, we get back the original $g(x)$:

In principle, we can do this for any function $g(x)$, even if $g(x)$ isn’t a trigonometric function (e.g. $g(x) = x^2$). For now, you should treat the transformation that does this as a black box. If you’re interested later, you can read more about the transformation, which is called a Fourier transform.

Whew! With that bit of theory out of the way, we can start talking about the images themselves…

## Representing Images Mathematically

From here on in, we’ll only talk about 1D images (i.e. those consisting of a single row of pixels), in grayscale. Everything we talk about will generalize to 2D color images, however. This just makes the graphs easier to draw :)

For analysis, we’ll use functions to represent images. These functions are defined over the spatial extents of the image. For every point $(x, y)$ on the graph, $y \in [0, 1]$ denotes how much light is measured or displayed at point $x$ in the image. The value $y = 0$ means pure black and $y = 1$ means pure white. All values in between are shades of gray.

Below is a 1D image and its corresponding image function:

TODO example graph and image


This function is called the signal. The term originates from signal processing, the field where most of this content originated.

## Sampling

On a computer, we represent the signal by sampling it. To sample the signal, we move along the $x$ axis, stopping at regular intervals and recording the $y$ value at each $x$. The result is a set of $(x, y)$ points from the original function. We call these points samples or pixels.

TODO diagram for sampling the graph above


Of course, we lose information when we do this. Given only a set of sample points, we can only guess at what the original function looked like. For example, given these points:

TODO points


The original function could have looked like this:

TODO lerped


Or this:

TODO cubic interpolation


Or even this:

TODO something crazy


The process of recreating a function from its sample points is called reconstruction. Reconstruction isn’t perfect, but it works fine given enough input data. More input data makes reconstruction more accurate.

## The Nyquist Limit

We mentioned that we sample by moving along the $x$ axis at regular intervals. One natural question is: How big should these intervals be? Using a smaller gives us a better reconstruction (because there’s more data), but it requires more storage space. How large can we get away with making our sampling interval without ruining the reconstruction?

Harry Nyquist approached this problem by thinking in the frequency domain. His Nyquist Limit works as follows:

Look at the frequency domain representation of the image. Find the highest-frequency point that has a non-zero amplitude. Let $f$ be the frequency associated with this point. $f$ is the highest frequency component of the continuous image signal.

The wavelength of $f$ is $\frac{1}{f}$. To faithfully represent the original function, the sampling interval must be no larger than $\frac{1}{2f}$. Equivalently, the sampling frequency must be $\geq 2f$.

To gain insight on why this is true, try playing with this CS123 applet.

## Dealing With the Nyquist Limit

Thanks to the Nyquist limit, we now know how to sample an image: just choose a high enough sampling frequency to faithfully represent the image, and sample the image intensity at each of the sample points.

There’s a htich: the maximum frequency of an image is highly variable, but your camera’s sampling rate is fixed. Digital cameras sample using a rectangular array of CCDs, each of which samples the light intensity at that point. The camera’s sampling rate is constant, determined by how far apart the CCDs are placed.

TODO diagram of a signal with high frequency stuff


Although we cannot faithfully represent signals from scenes with high frequency data, we can represent a subset of the scene. What we need is a modified version of the scene, identical to the original except with all of the high frequency data somehow cut out.

TODO diagrams of corresponding filtered signal


This is where image filtering comes into play.

## Low-Pass Filtering

The filter that removes high-frequency data is called a low-pass filter. The name simply means low-frequency data is _pass_ed through the filter, while high frequency data is removed. As you might imagine, this is where the frequency domain comes in handy!

Consider our original signal from a little while ago:

TODO spatial graph


Here’s its frequency graph, determined by a discrete Fourier transform:

TODO frequency graph


To filter out the high frequencies, we just zero the amplitude at any point beyond the maximum allowable frequency $f_{max}$ (determined by the Nyquist limit):

TODO another frequency graph


Then we can reconstruct the spatial signal using a Fourier transform:

TODO filtered graph


Now we can sample with impunity!

## Filtering Math

As it will turn out later, it’s useful to represent the idea of filtering in the frequency domain as multiplying the frequency function by a filter function. That is,

For low-pass filtering, we want all frequencies from $-f_{max}$ to $f_{max}$ to keep the same amplitude. We want all frequencies outside that range to have an amplitude of 0. The former is achieved by multiplying the amplitudes by 1; the latter is achieved by multiplying by 0.

Let $box(m, x)$ be defined as follows:

if |x| < m
return 1
else
return 0


$box(m, x)$ looks like this:

TODO graph


To low-pass filter in the frequency domain, we can multiply the signal by $box(f_{max}, x)$:

TODO graph of example multiplication


## Recap

We’ve gone off on a few tangents now, so maybe it’s time to remind ourselves what exactly we’re trying to do.

We want to represent images using discrete samples. To do this correctly, there’s a minimum number of samples we must take. The Nyquist limit tells us exactly how many.

Unfortunately, the resolutions of our cameras and monitors is fixed. Instead of taking more samples, we have to reduce the complexity of the image.

Here’s our algorithm for doing that

• Use a Fourier transform to obtain the frequency plot of the signal
• Multiply by the box function to remove high frequencies we can’t represent
• Use a Fourier transform to obtain the spatial plot of the modified frequency plot
• That’s our image!

## Why is Any of This Useful Anyway?

TODO

• Mention that the camera does all the prefiltering in hardware already.
• All this stuff is only useful when you need to resample an image for some reason, like scaling.
• Maybe want to restructure things a bit actually. Otherwise this section seems kinda random.

There’s a Better (Read: Faster) Way

• All this is complex math. It’s probably pretty complicated and slow. Let’s not deal with it?
• It turns out you can do something completely different, entirely in the sample domain, to get the same result.
• Namely, we can do convolution using the sinc(x) function.
• Show sinc.

Convolution

• Urgh. Hard to explain.
• I’ll deal with this later haha

Actually, That Strategy Sucks Too

• I have a few stock answers for why it sucks, but I can’t explain why (i.e. why are negatives really that bad?)
• So look it up and have a solid answer for this

Approximate!

• We want functions with the same general shape
• The box is a kind of silly approximation, but even then it’s a first-order approximation.
• Triangle is better
• Discrete gaussians are pretty close.

Recap

• What we just did was low-pass filtering, “pass” (preserve) lower frequencies while deleting high frequencies.
• We did this so we can preserve just the information we can actually represent with our pixel grid
• There are more complexities, of course (taking a picture implicitly does some filtering). Read hughes/van dam (or CS123 slides!).
• There’s a related problem …

This should probably be a different but shorter blog post

Image Scaling

• Idea that we’re taking more or less fine-grained regularly distributed samples.
• Let’s look at scaling up first

Reconstruction

• We’re missing data.
• All we have is these points. What happened in between?
• Some examples of what could have happened
• So we’ll just guess. What’s a good guess?
• Some different interpolation functions.
• We can just sample along these graphs. Noice!

Downscaling

• We can use the same strategy for scaling images down, right?
• One major problem … what happens to the frequencies when we scale down?
• Oh no. They go up. What if we have high frequencies again?
• Well we know what to do. Filter them out first! Then resample.
• It turns out you can filter and intepolate in one step, using a single filter function.

Recap

• Again we passed over stuff.
• Hopefully you at least have a good enough intuition to talk about theoretical complexities now.
• Happy filtering!