Image averaging

Now that we are familiar with the notion of a neighborhood, we are ready to delve into the details of an operation called image averaging. As the name suggests, image averaging involves taking the mean of pixel intensity values. More specifically, each pixel is replaced by the mean of all pixels in its neighborhood. The size of the neighborhood is one of the parameters that is usually passed to the function that implements this sort of an averaging procedure. For illustration purposes, we consider a neighborhood of 3 x 3 around the pixel (this would include the pixel and its eight immediate neighbors). For example, consider the next image (you can take it to be a small sub-section within the entire image). Let's say that we wish to compute the output intensity value corresponding to the pixel with an intensity of 6 in the input image. We take the 3 x 3 neighborhood of that pixel and calculate the mean of all those values (the values have been marked in bold-face). Hence,...