Image Smoothing

Author: Ravindra Sadaphule

Image smoothing is an operation thats used to remove noise, sharpness and clutter in the image to give you much more smoother and blended effect. With power of opencv and python, you can achieve several smoothing effects with few lines of code.

Basically the way it works is first selecting a kernel (3x3, 5x6 etc) and then convolving with image. The intensity of center pixel is determined by pixel intensities of neighborhood pixel. Depending upon kernel values and the type of aggregation you get several smoothing effects

Average Smoothing:

Here the kernel has uniform weights as shown below. Convolving with this filter simply yields average of pixel intensities in the neighborhood

We apply this filter on following image

Before Average Smoothing

Here is the output after applying average smoothing. As you can see noise( design details on building, trees) are removed giving you a much more smoother image

After Average smoothing