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Concept
Gaussian blur
Summary
In , a Gaussian blur (also known as Gaussian smoothing) is the result of blurring an by a Gaussian function (named after mathematician and scientist Carl Friedrich Gauss).
It is a widely used effect in graphics software, typically to reduce and reduce detail. The visual effect of this blurring technique is a smooth blur resembling that of viewing the image through a translucent screen, distinctly different from the bokeh effect produced by an out-of-focus lens or the shadow of an object under usual illumination.
Gaussian smoothing is also used as a pre-processing stage in computer vision algorithms in order to enhance image structures at different scales—see scale space representation and scale space implementation.
Mathematically, applying a Gaussian blur to an image is the same as convolving the image with a Gaussian function. This is also known as a two-dimensional Weierstrass transform. By contrast, convolving by a circle (i.e., a circular box blur) would more accurately reproduce the bokeh effect.
Since the Fourier transform of a Gaussian is another Gaussian, applying a Gaussian blur has the effect of reducing the image's high-frequency components; a Gaussian blur is thus a low-pass filter.
The Gaussian blur is a type of image-blurring filter that uses a Gaussian function (which also expresses the normal distribution in statistics) for calculating the transformation to apply to each pixel in the image. The formula of a Gaussian function in one dimension is
In two dimensions, it is the product of two such Gaussian functions, one in each dimension:
where x is the distance from the origin in the horizontal axis, y is the distance from the origin in the vertical axis, and σ is the standard deviation of the Gaussian distribution. It is important to note that the origin on these axes are at the center (0, 0). When applied in two dimensions, this formula produces a surface whose contours are concentric circles with a Gaussian distribution from the center point.
Values from this distribution are used to build a convolution matrix which is applied to the original image.
Official source
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