Introduction to frequency domain

In the frequency domain, a digital image is converted

from spatial domain to frequency domain
In the frequency domain, image filtering is used for
image enhancement for a specific application and we deal
with the rate at which the pixel values are changing in
spatial domain.
For simplicity, Let’s put it this way
Spatial domain
 Con’t…
In simple spatial domain, we directly deal with the image
matrix.
Whereas frequency domain, we first transform the image
to its frequency distribution
Then black box system perform what ever processing it
has to performed, and the output of the black box in this
case is not an image, but a transformation.
After performing inverse transformation, it is converted
into an image which is then viewed in spatial domain.
Con’t…

It can be pictorially viewed as

 Transformation
A signal can be converted from time domain into
frequency domain using mathematical operators
called transforms.
There are many kind of transformation that does this.
Some of them are given below.
Fourier Series
Fourier transformation
Laplace transform
Z transform
Out of all these, we will thoroughly discuss Fourier
series and Fourier transformation
Frequency component
Any image in spatial domain can be represented in a
frequency domain.
But what do this frequencies actually mean?
We will divide frequency components into two major
components.
High frequency components
High frequency components correspond to edges in an
image(that change greatly in intensity over short image
distances)
Low frequency components
Low frequency components in an image correspond to
smooth regions(that change smoothly in intensity
over short image distances)
 Fourier Transform

Fourier
Fourier was a mathematician in 1822
He give Fourier series and Fourier transform to
convert a signal into frequency domain
Any function that is not periodic can be expressed
as the integral of sines and /or cosines
The Fourier Transform is an important image
processing tool which is used to decompose an image
into its sine and cosine components
 Con’t…
Fourier transform is a decomposition of a signal into some
basis functions.
The output of the transformation represents the image in
the Fourier or frequency domain
The input image the spatial domain equivalent
In the Fourier domain image, each point represents a
particular frequency contained in the spatial domain
image.
The Fourier transform has many wide applications that
include, image compression (e.g JPEG compression),
filtering and image analysis.
 Fourier Series
It further states that periodic signals can be broken
down into further signals with the following
properties
Some potential applications of the Fourier series that
were mentioned include signal filtering, noise
removal, identifying the resonant frequency of a
structure, compression of audio signals, and speech
recognition.
 Con’t…
Any periodic function can be expressed as the sum of sines and /or
cosines of different frequencies, each multiplied by a different
coefficients
The Fourier series can be denoted by this formula

The inverse can be calculated by this formula

 Difference between Fourier series and
transform
The difference between them is Fourier
series is applied on periodic signals and
Fourier transform is applied for non periodic
signals.
Which one is applied on images?
Images are non-periodic.
And since the images are non periodic, so
Fourier transform is used to convert them
into frequency domain.
Con’t…
 Discrete Fourier transform
Since we are dealing with images, and in fact digital images, so
for digital images we will be working on discrete Fourier
transform,
It include three things.
Spatial Frequency
Magnitude
Phase(degree)

The spatial frequency directly relates with the

brightness of the image.
The magnitude of the sinusoid directly relates with the contrast.
Contrast is the difference between maximum and minimum pixel
intensity.
Phase contains the color information.
2 dimensional discrete Fourier transform is given
The discrete Fourier transform is actually the
sampled Fourier transform, so it contains some
samples that denotes an image.
In the below formula f(x,y) denotes the image, and
F(u,v) denotes the discrete Fourier transform.
Con’t…
The formula for 2 dimensional inverse discrete
Fourier transform is given below

The inverse discrete Fourier transform converts

the Fourier transform back to the image
Frequency information of images
The intensity of an image changes a lot,
then it is a high frequency image.
The brightness level changes quickly
from one pixel to the next.
A low-frequency image may be one that
is relatively uniform in brightness or
changes very slowly.
 Frequency information of images
Most of the images have both low and high-frequency parts.
Color of the left image change very gradually which is
considered smooth, low frequency pattern
On the right stripped image, it have a high-frequency image
pattern, this image changes very rapidly from one brightness
to another
Con’t…
Con’t…
The gray background behind the squirrel is a low frequency
area because the intensities of the pixels slowly evolve
from one pixel to another.
On the contrary, the tail is a high frequency area because
the intensities of the pixels show a rapid alternation
between the hair and the background.
Image enhancement in frequency domain

Image enhancement in the frequency

domain is straightforward.
We simply compute the Fourier transform of
the image to be enhanced, multiply the
result by a filter (rather than convolve in the
spatial domain), and take the inverse
transform to produce the enhanced image.
 Con’t…
The idea of blurring an image by reducing its high
frequency components.
sharpening an image by increasing the magnitude of its
high frequency components is intuitively easy to understand
However, computationally, it is often more efficient to
implement these operations as convolutions by small spatial
filters in the spatial domain.
Understanding frequency domain concepts is important,
and leads to enhancement techniques that might not have
been thought of by restricting attention to the spatial
domain.
 Con’t…
The concept of filtering is easier to visualize in the
frequency domain.
Therefore, enhancement of image f (m,n) can be
done in the frequency domain, based on its DFT F(u,
v).
This is particularly useful, if the spatial extent of the
point spread sequence h(m, n) is large.
In this case, the convolution
 Con’t…
We can therefore directly design a transfer function
H (u, v) and implement the enhancement in the
frequency domain as follows:
The transfer function is multiplyed with all pixel,
then convert to fourier transform
Basic steps for filtering in the frequency domain
 Con’t…
1. multiply the input image by (-1)x+y to center the
transform to u = M/2 and v = N/2…..//preprocessing
2. compute F(u,v), the 2-D DFT of the image from (1)
3. multiply F(u,v) by a filter function H(u,v)
4. compute the inverse DFT of the result in (3)
5. obtain the real part of the result in (4)
6. multiply the result in (5) by (-1)x+y to cancel the
multiplication of the input image
 Con’t…

1. image f(x,y) of size M*N

2. f(x,y)(-1)x+y……proprocessing
3. F(u,v)------T.F of f(x,y)…..Fourier transfer image
4. H(u,v)== filter in frequency domain
G(u,v)=H(u,v)*F(u,v)
5.g(x,y)=inverse Fourier transformation
END