We study a compactness property of the operators between weighted Lebesgue spaces that average a function over certain domains involving a star-shaped region. The cases covered are (i) when the average is taken over a difference of two dilations of a star-shaped region in $\RR^N$, and (ii) when the average is taken over all dilations of star-shaped regions in $\RR^N$. These cases include, respectively, the average over annuli and the average over balls centered at origin.

We study the stability of linear filters associated with certain types of linear difference equations with variable coefficients. We show that stability is determined by the locations of the poles of a rational transfer function relative to the spectrum of an associated weighted shift operator. The known theory for filters associated with constant-coefficient difference equations is a special case.