METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR FILTERING DIGITAL DATA BY CONCATENATING PREPROCESSED OVERLAPPING GROUPS OF THE DATA

An image, of the type that is comprised of an array of pixels, is filtered by the steps of: (a) reading a respective group of pixels from the array for each individual pixel that is in the array, with each pixel group overlapping other pixel groups and consisting of pixels that are contiguous with the individual pixel; (b) quantizing each of the respective groups of pixels; (c) retrieving from a memory, a single pixel for each quantized group of pixels, with the single pixel being the result of a pre-performed transformation on the quantized group of pixels; and (d) concatenating the retrieved pixels to form the filter image.