Pyramid (image processing)

This operation may then proceed as many times as desired, leading to a compact and efficient multi-scale representation.

If motivated by specific requirements, intermediate scale levels may also be generated where the subsampling stage is sometimes left out, leading to an oversampled or hybrid pyramid.

[11] With the increasing computational efficiency of CPUs available today, it is in some situations also feasible to use wider supported Gaussian filters as smoothing kernels in the pyramid generation steps.

[13] A steerable pyramid, developed by Simoncelli and others, is an implementation of a multi-scale, multi-orientation band-pass filter bank used for applications including image compression, texture synthesis, and object recognition.

[11][17][18] Levels of a Laplacian pyramid can be added to or removed from the original image to amplify or reduce detail at different scales.

However, detail manipulation of this form is known to produce halo artifacts in many cases, leading to the development of alternatives such as the bilateral filter.