WP8: Is there an easy way to scale and blur an BitmapImage for windows phone app?

Question

I am working on a windows Phone app that can read Album arts dynamically from Music files through MediaPlayer APIs. I wish to get album arts and resize for view's background. Since the resize would lose details and make image ugly so I would like to blur it or some kind of effect. Is there any API that I can blur the image? (either from C# or XAML)? Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

I would start by using WriteableBitmap instead, to get a WriteableBitmap from a BitmapImage you can do the following:

WriteableBitmap wb = new WriteableBitmap(bitmapImage);

Then I would recommend using the WriteableBitmapExtension library. It has support for resizing the image:

wb.Resize(newWidth, newHeight, WriteableBitmapExtensions.Interpolation.Bilinear);

To do the gaussian blur with WritableBitmapExtensions do the following (for some reason concolution doesn't edit the writableBitmap, so you have to assign it again to the same writableBitmap to see the result):

wb = wb.Convolute(WriteableBitmapExtensions.KernelGaussianBlur5x5);

or

wb = wb.Convolute(WriteableBitmapExtensions.KernelGaussianBlur3x3);

(Just different weights for the neighbouring pixels).