Image Frequency and Its Application

Chujiao Ma, Katherine Eliott, and Andrew Tsang

This is a little project that we decided to do for our Signals and System class at Olin College.

We decided to explore the frequency domain of images and its applications. Greyscale images, when quantitzed, are a function of brightness over a space (x,y). Just as a signal in the time domain can be expressed as the sum of complex exponentials, so can a signal in the 2-D spatial domain. For our project, our group explored how the concepts we have learned in signals and systems thus far can be applied to the spatial domain. What does it mean for an image to have a frequency content? What does the Fourier transform of an image even look like? Why do we even care about the Fourier transform of an image?

For more information and detailed explanation, read our final report, or look at our presentation slides.

The video shown below is the implementation of our results in MATLAB:

If you would like to look at the MATLAB code, download here.

Copyright 2009 Chujiao Ma, Andrew Tsang, and Katherine Eliott.