0% found this document useful (0 votes)

9 views

Fundamentals of Image Processing

The document discusses the origins and fundamentals of digital image processing. It begins by explaining how one of the first applications of digital images was transmitting newspaper pictures via submarine cable in the 1920s. It then covers topics like the human visual system, image sensing and acquisition, what constitutes a digital image, and the concepts of sampling and quantization in converting analog images to digital form.

Uploaded by

Avadhraj Verma

Available Formats

Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

0% found this document useful (0 votes)

9 views

Fundamentals of Image Processing

Uploaded by

Avadhraj Verma

Available Formats

Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

You are on page 1/ 103

Fundamentals of Image

Processing
The Origins of Digital Image Processing
• One of the first applications of digital images was in the
newspaper industry, when pictures were first sent by submarine
cable between London and New York.

• Bartlane cable picture transmission system in the early 1920s

reduced the time required to transport a picture across the
Atlantic from more than a week to less than three hours.

• Specialized printing equipment coded pictures for cable

transmission and then reconstructed them at the receiving end.
• Initial problems in improving the visual quality of early digital
pictures were sometimes related to the selection of printing
procedures and the distribution of intensity levels.

A digital picture produced in 1921 from a

coded tape by a telegraph printer with
special type faces.
Human Visual System
• The function of a visual system is to detect electromagnetic radiation (EMR) emitted by objects.

• Humans can detect light wavelength between 400-700 nm.

• Perceived color (hue) is related to the wavelength of light.

• Brightness is related to the intensity of the radiation.

• Functions of vision
• Discriminate figure from background (food or rock?)
• Detect movement (predator / prey?)
• Detect color (adaptive value of color vision)
Image Sensing and Acquisition
• Most of the images in which we are interested are generated by the
combination of an "illumination" source and the reflection or absorption
of energy from that source by the elements of the "scene" being
imaged.

• The illumination may originate from a source of electromagnetic energy

such as radar, infrared, or X-ray system or ultrasound or even a
computer-generated illumination pattern.

• Depending on the nature of the source, illumination energy is reflected

from, or transmitted through objects.
EM Spectrum.

Bands of the EM spectrum are not distinct but rather transition smoothly from one to the other.
Cont.
• The visible spectrum can be divided into three bands:
• Light is a particular type of electromagnetic radiation that can be
sensed by the human eye.

• The colors that humans perceive in an object are determined by the

nature of the light reflected from the object.

• For example, green objects reflect light with wavelengths primarily in

the 500 to 570 nm range while absorbing most of the energy at other
wavelengths.

• Light that is void of color is called monochromatic (or achromatic) light.

• In addition to frequency, three basic quantities are used to describe
the quality of a chromatic light source: radiance, luminance, and
brightness.

• Radiance is the total amount of energy that flows from the light
source, and it is usually measured in watts (W)
• Luminance, measured in lumens (Im), gives a measure of the
amount of energy an observer perceives from a light source.

• Brightness is a subjective descriptor of light perception that is

practically impossible to measure.

• The part of the infrared band close to the visible spectrum is called
the near-infrared region.

• The opposite end of this band is called the far-infrared region.

• In principle, if a sensor can be developed that is capable of detecting
energy radiated by a band of the electromagnetic spectrum, we can
image events of interest in that band.

• It is important to note, however, that the wavelength of an

electromagnetic wave required to "see" an object must be of the same
size as or smaller than the object.

• This limitation, along with the physical properties of the sensor

material, establishes the fundamental limits on the capability of
imaging sensors, such as visible, infrared, and other sensors in use
today.
Image Acquisition Using a Single Sensor
• Sensor of this type is the photodiode

• The use of a filter in front of a sensor

improves selectivity.

• In order to generate a 2-D image

using a single sensor, there has to be
relative displacements in both the x-
and y-directions between the sensor
and the area to be imaged.
Image Acquisition Using Sensor Arrays
• Figure shows individual
sensors arranged in the
form of a 2-D array.

• This is also the

predominant arrangement
found in digital cameras.

• A typical sensor for these

cameras is a CCD array.
A Simple Image Formation Model
• The function f(x,y) may be characterized by two components:

1. the amount of source illumination incident on the scene being

viewed, and
2. the amount of illumination reflected by the obiects in the scene.

• Appropriately, these are called the illumination and reflectance

components and are denoted by i(x,y) and r(x,y), respectively.
A Simple model of image formation
What is a Digital Image?
A digital image is a representation of a two-dimensional image as a
finite set of digital values, called picture elements or pixels
Cont.
• This figure shows the energy from an illumination source being
reflected from a scene element.

• The first function performed by the imaging system is to collect

the incoming energy and focus it onto an image plane.

• If the illumination is light, the front end of the imaging system is

an optical lens that projects the viewed scene onto the lens
focal plane.
Cont.
• The sensor array, which is coincident with the focal plane produces
outputs proportional to the integral of the light received at each sensor.

• Digital and analog circuitry sweep these outputs and convert them to
an analog signal, which is then digitized by another section of the
imaging system.

• The output is a digital image.

Cont.
Pixel values typically represent gray levels, colours, heights, opacities
etc
Remember digitization implies that a digital image is an approximation
of a real scene

1 pixel
What is a Digital Image? (cont…)
Common image formats include:
• 1 sample per point (B&W or Grayscale)
• 3 samples per point (Red, Green, and Blue)
• 4 samples per point (Red, Green, Blue, and “Alpha”, a.k.a. Opacity)

For most of this course we will focus on grey-scale images

What is Digital Image?
• Image: A two-dimensional function, f(x,y), where x and y are spatial
coordinates, and f at any pair of coordinates (x,y) is called the intensity or
gray level of the image at that point.

• When x, Y, and f are all finite, discrete quantities, image is a digital image.
Analog vs Digital
Advantages of Digital Image Processing
• Humans are limited to the visual band of the electromagnetic
(EM) spectrum.

• But imaging machines cover almost the entire EM spectrum, ranging from
gamma to radio waves.

• Thus operate on images generated by sources that humans are not

capable to sense.

• These include ultrasound, electron microscopy, and computer-generated

images.
Useful Paradigm in the World of Images
• Considering three types of computerized processes:

• Low-level processes,
• Mid-level processes
• High-level processes.

• First involves primitive operations such as image preprocessing to

reduce noise, contrast enhancement, and image sharpening.

• Thus, a low-level process is characterized by the fact that both its inputs
and outputs are images.
Cont.
• Second involves tasks such as segmentation, description of those
objects to reduce them to a form suitable for computer processing, and
classification of individual objects.

• Thus, a mid-level process is characterized by the fact that its inputs

generally are images, but its outputs are attributes extracted from those
images (e.g., edges, contours, and the identity of individual objects).

• Third involves "making sense" of an ensemble of recognized objects, as

in image analysis, and at the far end performing the functions normally
associated with vision.
Sampling and quantization

• The quality of a digital image is determined to a large degree by the

number of samples and discrete intensity levels used in sampling and
quantization.
• For numerous ways to acquire images, objective is same:

To generate digital images from sensed data.

• The output of most sensors is a continuous voltage waveform

whose amplitude and spatial behavior are related to the
physical phenomenon being sensed.

• To create a digital image, we need to convert the continuous

sensed data into digital form.

• This involves two processes: sampling and quantization.

Cont.
• Sampling the analog signal mean instantaneously measuring the
voltage of the signal at fixed interval in time.

• The value of the voltage at each instant is converted into a number

and stored.

• The number represents the brightness of the image at that point.

• The "grabbed" image is now a digital image and can be accessed as a
two dimensional array of data.

• Each data point is called a pixel (picture element).

• The notation used to express a digital image: I(r, c)

• I(r,c) = The brightness of the image at point (r,c)

• Where, r = row and c = column.

Basic Concepts in Sampling and Quantization
• Let a continuous image f is to be converted to digital form.

• An image may be continuous with respect to the × and y coordinates,

and also in amplitude.

• To convert it to digital form, we have to sample the function in both

coordinates and in amplitude.

• Digitizing the coordinate values is called sampling.

• Digitizing the amplitude values is called quantization.
• A plot of amplitude
(intensity level) values
of the continuous image
along the line segment
AB.

• To sample this function,

we take equally spaced
samples along line AB.
• The samples are shown
as small white squares
superimposed on the
function.

• The set of these discrete

locations gives the
sampled function.

• However, the values of

the samples still span
(vertically) a continuous
range of intensity values.
• The assignment is made
depending on the vertical
proximity of a sample to a
vertical tick mark.

• The digital samples resulting

from both sampling and
quantization are shown.

• Starting at the top of the

image and carrying out this
procedure line by line
produces a two dimensional
digital image.
• When a sensing strip is used for image acquisition, the number of
sensors in the strip establishes the sampling limitations in one
image direction.

• When a sensing array is used for image acquisition, there is no

motion and the number of sensors in the array establishes the
limits of sampling in both directions.
• The quality of a digital image is determined to a large degree
by the number of samples and discrete intensity levels used in
sampling and quantization.
Image sampling (example)
original image sampled by a factor of 2

sampled by a factor of 4 sampled by a factor of 8

Image quantization(example)
• 256 gray levels (8bits/pixel) 32 gray levels (5 bits/pixel) 16 gray levels (4 bits/pixel)

• 8 gray levels (3 bits/pixel) 4 gray levels (2 bits/pixel) 2 gray levels (1 bit/pixel)

How are images represented in the computer?
Image formation
• There are two parts to the image formation process:

• The geometry of image formation, which determines where in the image

plane the projection of a point in the scene will be located.

• The physics of light, which determines the brightness of a point in the image
plane as a function of illumination and surface properties.
Image digitization

• Sampling means measuring the value of an image at a finite number of points.

• Quantization is the representation of the measured value at the sampled point by
an integer.
Digital image
• An image is represented by a rectangular array of integers.
• An integer represents the brightness or darkness of the image at that point.
• N: # of rows, M: # of columns, Q: # of gray levels
• N= ,M= , Q = (q is the # of bits/pixel)
• Storage requirements: NxMxQ (e.g., N=M=1024, q=8, 1MB)
Image file formats
• Many image formats adhere to the simple model shown below (line by line, no breaks
between lines).
• The header contains at least the width and height of the image.
• Most headers begin with a signature or “magic number” - a short sequence of bytes for
identifying the file format.
Cont.
• The magic number bytes header is used to identify the type of file.
The image data is the actual image data, which is stored in a binary
format.

• The magic number bytes header is a sequence of bytes that is

unique to the file type. These bytes are used by software to identify
the file type and load the image data.
Cont.
• The image data is stored in a binary format, which means that it is
represented as a sequence of bits. The bits are stored in groups of 8,
which are called bytes. Each byte can represent a value from 0 to
255.

• The diagram shows that the magic number bytes header is followed
by the image data. The image data is then followed by a padding
byte, which is a byte that is used to pad the file to a certain size.
Common image file formats
• GIF (Graphic Interchange Format) -
• PNG (Portable Network Graphics)
• JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group)
• TIFF (Tagged Image File Format)
• PGM (Portable Gray Map)
• FITS (Flexible Image Transport System)
• GIF: A lossless image format that uses a color palette of up to 256 colors. GIF
files are often used for web graphics, as they can be relatively small in size.

• PNG: A lossless image format that supports up to 16 million colors. PNG files
are often used for images that require high color accuracy, such as logos and
illustrations.

• JPEG: A lossy image format that uses a compression algorithm to reduce the
file size of an image. JPEG files are often used for photographs, as they can be
compressed without significantly affecting the image quality.

• TIFF: A lossless image format that supports a wide range of color depths and
resolutions. TIFF files are often used for images that require high quality, such
as scanned documents and photographs.
Cont.
• PGM: The Portable Graymap (PGM) format is a simple, lossless image
format that stores grayscale images. Each pixel in a PGM image is
represented by a single byte, which can store a value from 0 to 255. This
means that PGM images can store a maximum of 256 different gray levels.

• FITS: The Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) format is a more complex,
lossless image format that can store grayscale, color, and spectral images.
FITS images are typically used in astronomy and other scientific
applications.
Comparison of image formats
• PGM: A binary image file format that stores grayscale images.

• GIF: A lossless image file format that stores images with a limited number of colors.

• TIF: A lossless image file format that stores images with a wide range of colors.

• PS: A vector image file format that stores images as a set of mathematical objects.

• HIPS: A lossless image file format that stores images with a high dynamic range.

• JPG (lossless): A lossless image file format that stores images using a compression algorithm
that preserves image quality.

• JPG (lossy): A lossy image file format that stores images using a compression algorithm that
reduces image quality to save space.
PGM format
• A popular format for grayscale images (8 bits/pixel)
• Closely-related formats are:
• PBM (Portable Bitmap), for binary images (1 bit/pixel)
• PPM (Portable Pixelmap), for color images (24 bits/pixel)

ASCII or binary (raw) storage

What is Digital Image Processing?

Digital image processing focuses on two major tasks

• Improvement of pictorial information for human interpretation
• Processing of image data for storage, transmission and representation for
autonomous machine perception

Some argument about where image processing ends and fields such as
image analysis and computer vision start.
What is DIP? (cont…)

The continuum from image processing to computer vision can be

broken up into low-, mid- and high-level processes

Low Level Process Mid Level Process High Level Process

Input: Image Input: Image Input: Attributes
Output: Image Output: Attributes Output: Understanding
Examples: Noise Examples: Object Examples: Scene
removal, image recognition, understanding,
sharpening segmentation autonomous navigation