A design technique for circularly symmetric low-pass filters

The design of two-dimensional (2-D) circularly-symmetric low-pass digital filters by cascading several rotated filters (a rotated filter is defined to be one produced by rotating a one-dimensional (1-D) continuous filter into a two-dimensional continuous filter which is in turn bilinearly transformed into a two-dimensional digital filter) is a well-known and useful technique. An alternate approach which is an extension of the above technique is presented. This new method is based on a spectral transformation from the one-dimensional discrete domain into the two-dimensional discrete domain. This approach retains most of the advantages of the original technique while permitting design entirely in the discrete domain, yielding filters with better stability characteristics, and facilitating frequency response optimization via nonlinear programming.