WP8: Is there an easy way to scale and blur an BitmapImage for windows phone app?

I am working on a windows Phone app that can read Album arts dynamically from Music files through MediaPlayer APIs. I wish to get album arts and resize for view's background. Since the resize would lose details and make image ugly so I would like to blur it or some kind of effect. Is there any API that I can blur the image? (either from C# or XAML)? Thanks a lot!