Numpy: Replace every value in the array with the mean of its adjacent elements

Question

I have an ndarray, and I want to replace every value in the array with the mean of its adjacent elements. The code below can do the job, but it is super slow when I have 700 arrays all with shape (7000, 7000) , so I wonder if there are better ways to do it. Thanks!

a = np.array(([1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9],[4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12],[3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]))
row,col = a.shape
new_arr = np.ndarray(a.shape)
for x in xrange(row):
    for y in xrange(col):
        min_x = max(0, x-1)
        min_y = max(0, y-1)
        new_arr[x][y] = a[min_x:(x+2),min_y:(y+2)].mean()
print new_arr

Answer 1

Well, that's a smoothing operation in image processing, which can be achieved with 2D convolution. You are working a bit differently on the near-boundary elements. So, if the boundary elements are let off for precision, you can use scipy's convolve2d like so -

from scipy.signal import convolve2d as conv2

out = (conv2(a,np.ones((3,3)),'same')/9.0

This specific operation is a built-in in OpenCV module as cv2.blur and is very efficient at it. The name basically describes its operation of blurring the input arrays representing images. I believe the efficiency comes from the fact that internally its implemented entirely in C for performance with a thin Python wrapper to handle NumPy arrays.

So, the output could be alternatively calculated with it, like so -

import cv2 # Import OpenCV module

out = cv2.blur(a.astype(float),(3,3))

Here's a quick show-down on timings on a decently big image/array -

In [93]: a = np.random.randint(0,255,(5000,5000)) # Input array

In [94]: %timeit conv2(a,np.ones((3,3)),'same')/9.0
1 loops, best of 3: 2.74 s per loop

In [95]: %timeit cv2.blur(a.astype(float),(3,3))
1 loops, best of 3: 627 ms per loop