> The second thing is that while a designer can poke pixels to get an icon that looks good, so can the computer. One of the things you can do is compute the frequency 'footprint' of the image, then change the render until the render foot print is as close as you can get to the original. HP did this for their ink jet printer half-toning algorithm. In a 16 x 16 pixel space you could almost exaustively search it on a modern machine.
Are exemplar uses of the FFT to analyze the signature and content of an image. Since a lot of work on this was done in the 80's I would expect some good summaries in the current texts on image processing.
Cool! Do you have a link/paper/book?