It is of a vital importance to reduce the frictional losses in the engines and hence the fuel/energy consumption. The major contributors to this are the oil control ring and cylinder liner interactions difficult to understand when comparing the experimental and theoretical results. The latter largely depend on the liner surface measurement and filtering type used in the simulations. Therefore, low-pass and high-pass filtrations were applied and the friction behaviors between the filtered liner surfaces and a perfectly flat ring surface were simulated for different engine speeds. The surfaces low-pass filtered by lower cutoffs showed higher friction, while the type of de-noising revealed about two and a half times higher friction. Stylus surfaces showed larger friction than the interference ones. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.