Lecture 

5:
Filtering in the spatial domain
Dr. Stephen Czarnuch

Memorial University of Newfoundland 1
 Agenda
• Correlation vs convolution
• Smoothing filters
– Linear filters: Average filter
– Nonlinear filters: Median filters
• Sharpening filters
– First derivative: Sobel
– Second derivative: Laplace

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 Spatial Filtering
• Intensity transformation: Changing the intensity level at 
a location of an image without using the neighbouring 
pixels
• Point operations
• Spatial filtering: Changing the intensity level at a location 
of an image using the intensity of neighbouring pixels
• Neighbourhood operations

3X3 neighbourhood

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 Spatial Filtering cont..
• A spatial filter consists of 
– a neighborhood, and 
– a predefined operation
• Linear spatial filtering of an image of size  with a 
filter of size  is given by the following expression: 

𝑔 𝑥, 𝑦 𝑤 𝑠, 𝑡 𝑓 𝑥 𝑠, 𝑦 𝑡

– Where:
𝑚 1 𝑛 1
𝑎 ;𝑏
2 2
𝑥 0,1,2 … 𝑀 1; 𝑦 0,1,2 … 𝑁 1
𝑤 𝑠, 𝑡 filter coefficients

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 Spatial Filtering

Figure 3.34: Gonzalez and 
Wood, Digital Image Processing
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https://towardsdatascience.com/intuitively‐understanding‐convolutions‐for‐deep‐learning‐1f6f42faee1

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 Spatial Correlation
The correlation of a filter w( x, y ) of size m  n
with an image f ( x, y ), denoted as w( x, y ) f ( x, y )

a b
w( x, y ) f ( x, y )    w(s, t ) f ( x  s, y  t )
s  a t  b

• Each pixel in the image is the result of applying the filter on the 
neighborhood and calculating the new value using this equation

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 Spatial Convolution
• A closely related concept is called convolution
• Convolution is basically the same as 
correlation except that the filter is first rotated 
by 180 degrees before application
The convolution of a filter w( x, y ) of size m  n
with an image f ( x, y ), denoted as w( x, y ) f ( x, y )
a b
w( x, y ) f ( x, y )    w(s, t ) f ( x  s, y  t )
s  a t  b

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 Correlation

Convolution

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Notes:
• What happens if the filter is symmetric?
– Convolution and correlation are the same
• Using correlation or convolution to perform 
spatial filtering can have very significant 
differences:
– Convolution is multiplication in the frequency 
domain
• Associative
– Correlation is multiplication by the complex 
conjugate in the frequency domain
• Not associative

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 Smoothing Spatial Filters
• Smoothing filters are used for blurring and for 
random noise reduction
• Smoothing filters are also called: 
– Averaging filters
– Low‐pass filters 
• Smoothing essentially removes “irrelevant” data:
– Pixel regions that are small relative to the size of the 
filtering kernel
• Smoothing spatial filters can include linear filters 
and nonlinear filters

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 Two Smoothing Averaging Filter Masks

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 Implementation for filtering an image

The general implementation for filtering an M  N image

with a weighted averaging filter of size m  n is given
a b

  w(s, t ) f ( x  s, y  t )
g ( x, y )  s  a t  b
a b

  w(s, t )
s  a t  b

where m  2a  1, n  2b  1.

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 Image smoothing with masks of 
various sizes

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 Example: Gross Representation of Objects
• Hubble space telescope

Intensity of small objects blend with background and large objects 
become blob‐like and easy to detect

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 Matlab Example
clear all
close all
% Synthetic image of a white square
I = zeros(200,200);
I(50:150, 50:150) = 1;
imshow(I,[]);

% create and apply 3x3 average box filter

w = [ 1 1 1; 1 1 1; 1 1 1];
w=w/9;
I2 = imfilter(I, w);
imtool(I2,[]);
pause;
% Apply 15x15 box filter
%I use the command fspecial to creat an average function
w = fspecial('average', [15 15]);
I3 = imfilter(I, w);
imtool(I3,[]);
pause;
% Show that averaging reduces noise
I = I + randn(200,200)*0.5;
figure, imshow(I,[]);
w = fspecial('average', [15 15]);
I4 = imfilter(I, w);
figure, imshow(I4,[]); • fspecial: useful to create filters
• imfilter: does cross correlation

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 Smoothing filters: Gaussian
• The weights are samples of the 
Gaussian function
• For filtering out considerable 
amount of high frequency 
components from the image  
 Gaussian kernel and filtering

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 σ and smoothing
• σ controls the amount of smoothing
• As σ increases, more samples must be obtained to represent
the Gaussian function accurately.

σ=3
Results of Gaussian filtering

Matlab command: imgaussfilt(A,sigma)
Filters image A with a 2‐D Gaussian smoothing kernel 
with standard deviation specified by sigma

Original image

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 Nonlinear (Order‐statistic) spatial 
filters
• Nonlinear 
– Based on ordering (ranking) the pixels contained 
in the filter mask
– Replacing the value of the center pixel with the 
value determined by the ranking result
– Examples include: median filter, max filter, min 
filter

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 Median Filter
• Consider a m x n kernel:
– Order the pixels according to their values
– Select the centre, or median value
• E.g., a 3 x 3 filter
– Neighbours: (10, 20, 20, 20, 15, 20, 20, 25, 100)
– Sorted: (10, 15, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 25, 100)
• Properties:
– Excellent noise reduction for certain types of random noise 
(e.g., impulse/salt and pepper)
• With considerably less blurring than linear filters of similar size
– Mean produces a value that does not necessary exist in the 
image. 
• Median always replaces with an existing pixel value

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Use of median filtering for noise 
reduction
 Matlab Example
I=imread('cameraman.tif');
I_noise=imnoise(I,'salt & pepper',0.09);
w1=fspecial('average',[5 5]);
I_Ave=imfilter(I_noise,w1);
I_Med=medfilt2(I_noise); % 2D median filtering
figure, imshow(I_noise); figure, imshow(I_Ave); figure, imshow(I_Med);

Noisy original Average filter Median filter

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