# what is meant by support of a filter?

what is meant by support of a filter in context of image processing? In the attached link of a short tutorial for detecting bar in an image by gabor filter,it is said that γ=1 helps in finding the support of the filter. link1

The support of a filter is then, intuitively, the "size" of the kernel. Any displacement for which the kernel function is $$0$$ means that we don't have to consider the corresponding point at all when calculating the value of an output point. Therefore, the most strict definition of support is that it is the set of displacements where the kernel function is non-zero. This could be a quite complicated set in general, and so isn't particularly helpful for understanding or calculation. A looser definition would be the support is any set (of displacements) which contains all the displacements where the kernel function is non-zero. This allows us to conservatively approximate the support with some simple-to-describe shape. This will usually be something like an ellipse or rectangle or square (or their lower-/higher-dimensional analogues). Given such a class of approximate shapes, the support will usually be taken to be the smallest approximate shape which contains all the displacements for which the kernel function is non-zero.