As discussed in more detail in chapter 4, functions whose area under the curve is finite can be represented in terms of sines and cosines of various frequencies. The sine/cosine component with highest frequency determines the highest “frequency content” of the function. Suppose that this highest frequency is finite and that the function is of unlimited duration (these functions are called band-limited functions). Then, the shannon sampling theorem theorem {bracewell (1955)}tells us that, if the function is samples at a rate equal to or greater than twice its highest frequency, it is possible to recover completely the orginal function from its sampled image. The corruption is in the original function is undersampled, then a phenomenon called aliasing corrupts the sampled image. The corruption is in the form of additional frequency components being introduced into the sampled function. These are called aliased frequencies, note that the sampling rate in images is the number of samples taken (in both spatial directions) per unit distance.
As it turns out, except for a special case discussed in the following paragraph, it is impossible to satisfy the sampling theorem in practice. We can only work with sampled data that are finite in duration. We can model the process of converting a function