Explanation for Values in Scharr-Filter used in OpenCV (and other places)

Question

The Scharr-Filter is explained in Scharrs dissertation. However the values given on page 155 (167 in the pdf) are [47 162 47] / 256. Multiplying this with the derivation-filter would yield:

Yet all other references I found use

Which is roughly the same as the ones given by Scharr, scaled by a factor of 32.

Now my guess is that the range can be represented better, but I'm curious if there is an official explanation somewhere.

Answer 1

To get the ball rolling on this question in case no "expert" can be found...

I believe the values [3, 10, 3] ... instead of [47 162 47] / 256 ... are used simply for speed. Recall that this method is competing against the Sobel Operator whose coefficient values are are 0, and positive/negative 1's and 2's.

Even though the divisor in the division, 256 or 512, is a power of 2 and can can be performed by a shift, doing that and multiplying by 47 or 162 is going to take more time. A multiplication by 3 however can in fact be done on some RISC architectures like the IBM POWER series in a single shift-and-add operation. That is 3x = (x << 1) + x. (On these architectures, the shifter and adder are separate units and can be done independently).

I don't find it surprising that Phd paper used the more complicated and probably more precise formula; it needed to prove or demonstrate something, and the author probably wasn't totally certain or concerned that it be used and implemented alongside other methods. The purpose in the thesis was probably to have "perfect rotational symmetry". Afterwards when one decides to implement it, that person I suspect used the approximation formula and gave up a little on perfect rotational symmetry, to gain speed. That person's goal as I said was to have something that was competitive at the expense of little bit of speed for this rotational stuff.

Since I'm guessing you are willing to do work this as it is your thesis, my suggestion is to implement the original algorithm and benchmark it against both the OpenCV Scharr and Sobel code.

The other thing to try to get an "official" answer is: "Use the 'source', Luke!". The code is on github so check it out and see who added the Scharr filter there and contact that person. I won't put the person's name here, but I will say that the code was added 2010-05-11.