Is it possible to calculate the mathematical function of a 2D image?

Question

The question basically says it all. I would like to add that lets suppose I have an image, a photograph and I wish to calculate its mathematical function, so that when I input x and y pixel value, it returns a vector consisting of R,G,B values at that x,y point. Therefore I can use a for loop to construct the whole image by just that function. I am not asking about the whole solution or algorithm here, but just that if this thing is possible, which direction should I take to go about doing this. Reference to relevant papers would be really nice.

Thanks Azmuh

Answer 1

Yes, it is absolutely always possible. Basically, if you choose some points, there is always (an infinity of) smooth explicit functions (that is nice functions) which value on the points is exactly the one you choose. For example, you can have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_polynomial or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigonometric_interpolation. They are two different methods to compute an explicit function which pass exactly by the data points you have. So you can apply those methods for your image, seen as a set of data points, and separately for R, G, and B.

At the end, you get one simple function explicitly (a polynomial or a trigonometric series, depending on what you chose), and you can compute its values where you want.

However, note that I would definitely not recommend to use those methods to effectively retrieve the data. Indeed, the functions you get are absolutely not optimized (that is with a veeeery high degree (for a n×m image, each color will have a degree nm-1), very high coefficients) and furthermore will have extremely large values between your original points (look for Runge's phenomenon).