[bartwr]

In image processing we often call those "binomial filters" due to this binomial distribution / Pascal triangle connection. Cool thing is that they both a) sum up to powers of 2, making the normalization divisions in fixed point super efficient - just bit shift! b) due to central limit theorem, they approximate Gaussian better and better. Very useful tool in image processing, especially on DSPs where fixed point / shorter integer arithmetic might be faster or wider vector sizes than floats.