Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION

1.1. WHAT IS AN IMAGE?

An image is defined as a two-dimensional function of two real variables, for
example, f(x, y), where x and y are spatial coordinates with f as the amplitude (e.g.
brightness) of the image at the real coordinate position (x, y).when (x, y) and the
amplitude values of f are all finite discrete quantities then, the image is generally called
as DIGITAL IMAGE. A digital image is a numeric representation, normally binary, of
a two-dimensional image. Depending on whether the image resolution is fixed, it may
be of vector or raster type. By itself, the term "digital image" usually refers to raster
images or bitmapped images (as opposed to vector images). Raster images have a finite
set of digital values, called picture elements or pixels. The digital image contains a
fixed number of rows and columns of pixels. Pixels are the smallest individual element
in an image, holding antiquated values that represent the brightness of a given color at
any specific point. The field of digital image processing refers to processing of digital
images by means of a digital computer. One of the advantages of digital images is the
ability to transfer them electronically almost instantaneously and convert them easily
from one medium to another such as from a web page to a computer screen to a printer
according to one’s need.
Image Processing is a technique to enhance raw images received from
cameras/sensors placed on satellites, space probes and aircrafts or pictures taken in
normal day-to-day life for various applications. Various techniques have been
developed in Image Processing during the last four to five decades. Most of the
techniques are developed for enhancing images obtained from unmanned space crafts,
space probes and military reconnaissance flights. Image Processing systems are
becoming popular due to easy availability of powerful personnel computers, large size
memory devices, graphics software etc.

 Image Processing is used in various applications such as:

• Remote Sensing
• Medical Imaging
• Non-destructive Evaluation

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• Forensic Studies
• Textiles
• Material Science.
• Military
• Film industry
• Document processing
• Graphic arts
• Printing Industry

 How digital image is formed?

Since capturing an image from a camera is a physical process.
The sunlight is used as a source of energy. A sensor array is used for the
acquisition of the image. So when the sunlight falls upon the object, then the
amount of light reflected by that object is sensed by the sensors, and a
continuous voltage signal is generated by the amount of sensed data. In order to
create a digital image, we need to convert this data into a digital form. This
involves sampling and quantization. (They are discussed later on). The result of
sampling and quantization results in a two dimensional array or matrix of
numbers which are nothing but a digital image.

 Image processing basically includes the following three steps of procedure:

 Importing the image via image acquisition tools;

 Analysing and manipulating the image;
 Output in which result can be altered image or report that is based on image
analysis.

Figure 1.1: Processing of Image

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1.2. TYPES OF IMAGES

Four main image types:

 Gray-scale images

 Binary images

 Indexed images

 RGB images

1.2.1. Gray-Scale Images

A gray-scale image is a matrix whose values represent shades of gray. When the
matrix is of type uint8, the integer-valued elements are in the range [0,255]. By
convention, the value 0 is displayed as black, and the value 255 is displayed as white.
Values in-between are displayed as intermediate shades of gray. When the matrix is of
type uint16, then 0 is displayed as black and 65535 is displayed as white. For a
floating-point matrix, either of type double or single, the value 1.0 is displayed as
white. Originally, the Image Processing Toolbox documentation called these intensity
images, and you might still find this term used in some places. Some of our colour
scientist users complained, though, that the term intensity image meant something
slightly different in their field, so we (mostly) changed our terminology.

Figure 1. 2: Gray-Scale Image

1.2.2. Binary Images

In image processing, the term binary image refers to a two-valued image whose

pixels are either black or white. (Or, a bit more generally, the pixels are either
background or foreground.) In MATLAB and the Image Processing Toolbox, we have

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adopted the convention that binary images are represented as logical matrices. Here's an
example of constructing a matrix whose type is logical and then displaying the result as
a binary (black-and-white) image

Figure 1.3: Binary Image

1.2.3. Indexed Images

An indexed image has two components: an index matrix of integers, commonly

called X, and a colour map matrix, commonly called map. The matrix map is an M-by-
3 matrix of floating-point values (either double or single) in the range [0.0,1.0]. Each
row of map specifies the red, green, and blue components of a single colour. An
indexed image is displayed by mapping values in the index matrix to colours in the
colour map. A quirk of MATLAB is that this mapping is data-type specific. If the index
matrix is floating-point, then the value 1.0 corresponds to the first colour in the colour
map. But if the index matrix is uint8 or uint16, then the value 0 corresponds to the first
colour. 

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Figure 1.4: Indexed Image

1.2.4. Color Images

An RGB image or color images is an M-by-N-by-3 array. For a particular pixel

at row r and column c, the three values RGB(r,c,1), RGB(r,c,2), and RGB(r,c,3)specify
the red, green, and blue colour components of that pixel. A pixel whose colour
components are [0,0,0] is displayed as black. For a floating-point array, a pixel whose
colour components are [1.0,1.0,1.0] is displayed as white. For a uint8 or uint16 array,
either [255,255,255] or [65535,65535,65535] is displayed as white.

Figure 1.5: RGB Image

1.3. BOLTS AND NUTS OF IMAGE:-

 Pixel

An image is composed of finite number of elements, each of which has

particular location and value. These elements are referred to as picture elements,
image elements, pels and pixels. Pixel is the smallest element of an image. Each pixel
corresponds to any one value. In a bit grayscale image, the value of the pixel between
0 and 255. The value of a pixel at any point corresponds to the intensity of the light
photons striking at that point. Each pixel stores a value proportional to the light
intensity at that particular location. You can have more understanding of the pixel
from the pictures given below.

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Figure 1.6: Pixels of Image

In the above picture, there may be thousands of pixels that together make up this
image. We will zoom that image to the extent that we are able to see some pixels
division. It is shown in the image below.

Figure 1.6: Pixels of Image

1.3.1. Calculation of total number of pixels
We have defined an image as a two dimensional signal or matrix. Then in that
case the number of PEL would be equal to the number of rows multiply with number
of columns.

This can be mathematically represented as below:

 Total number of pixels = number of rows ( X ) number of columns

Or we can say that the number of (x,y) coordinate pairs make up the total number of
pixels.

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Gray - level
The value of the pixel at any point denotes the intensity of image at that
location, and that is also known as gray level.

Pixel value.(0)
As it has already been define in the beginning of this tutorial that each pixel can
have only one value and each value denotes the intensity of light at that point of the
image.

We will now look at a very unique value 0. The value 0 means absence of light. It
means that 0 denotes dark, and it further means that whenever a pixel has a value of 0,
it means at that point, black colour would be formed.

1.3.2. Some Basic Relationships between Pixels

In this section, we consider several important relationships between pixels in a
digital image. As mentioned before, an image is denoted by f(x, y) .When referring in
this section to a particular pixel, we use lowercase letters, such as p and q. A pixel part
coordinates(x,y) has four horizontal and vertical neighbours whose coordinates are
given by
(x + 1, y), (x - 1, y), (x, y + 1), (x, y - 1)

and are denoted by ND(p). These points, together with the 4-neighbors, are called the
8-neighbors of p, denoted by N8(p). As before, some of the neighbour locations in
ND(p) and N8(p) fall outside the image if (x, y) is on the border of the image.

Adjacency, Connectivity, Regions, and Boundaries

Let V be the set of intensity values used to define adjacency. In a binary

image= 516 if we are referring to adjacency of pixels with value 1. In a gray-scale
image, the idea is the same, but set V typically contains more elements. For exam-
ple, in the adjacency of pixels with a range of possible intensity values 0 to 255, set
V could be any subset of these 256 values. We consider three types of adjacency:

(a) 4-adjacency. Two pixels p and q with values from V are 4-adjacent if q is in the
set N4(p).
(b) 8-adjacency. Two pixels p and q with values from V are 8-adjacent if q is in the
set N8(p).

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(c) m-adjacency (mixed adjacency). Two pixels p and q with values from V are m-
adjacent if
(i) q is in N4(p), or
(ii)q is in ND(p) and the set N4(p) ¨ N4(q) has no pixels whose values are from V.
Mixed adjacency is a modification of 8-adjacency. It is introduced to eliminate the
ambiguities that often arise when 8-adjacency is used..

A (digital) path (or curve) from pixel p with coordinates (x, y) to pixel q with
coordinates (s, t) is a sequence of distinct pixels with coordinates

(x0, y0), (x1, y1), Á , (xn, yn)

where (x0, y0) = (x, y), (xn, yn) = (s, t), and pixels (xi, yi) and (xi- 1, yi- 1) are adjacent
for 1 … i … n. In this case, n is the length of the path. If (x 0, y0) = (xn, yn), the path is
a closed path. We can define 4-, 8-, or m-paths depending on the type of adjacency
specified. Let S represent a subset of pixels in an image. Two pixels p and q are said
to be connected in S if there exists a path between them consisting entirely of pix-els
in S. For any pixel p in S, the set of pixels that are connected to it in S is called a
connected component of S. If it only has one connected component, then set S is
called a connected set.

Let R be a subset of pixels in an image. We call R a region of the image if R

is a connected set. Two regions, Ri and Rj are said to be adjacent if their union forms
a connected set. Regions that are not adjacent are said to be disjoint. We consider 4-
and 8-adjacency when referring to regions. For our definition to make sense, the type
of adjacency used must be specified.

Suppose that an image contains K disjoint regions, R k, k = 1, 2, Á , K, none

of which touches the image border.† Let Ru denote the union of all the K regions, and
let (Ru)c denote its complement (recall that the complement of a set S is the set of
points that are not in S). We call all the points in R u the foreground, and all the points
in (Ru)c the background of the image.

The boundary (also called the border or contour) of a region R is the set of
points that are adjacent to points in the complement of R. Said another way, the
border of a region is the set of pixels in the region that have at least one background
neighbour. Here again, we must specify the connectivity being used to define

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adjacency. The preceding definition sometimes is referred to as the inner border of

the region to distinguish it from its outer border, which is the corresponding border
in the background. This distinction is important in the development of border-
following algorithms. Such algorithms usually are formulated to fol-low the outer
boundary in order to guarantee that the result will form a closed path.. On the other
hand, the outer border of the region does form a closed path around the region.

If R happens to be an entire image (which we recall is a rectangular set of

pixels), then its boundary is defined as the set of pixels in the first and last rows and
columns of the image. This extra definition is required because an image has no
neighbors beyond its border. Normally, when we refer to a region, we are referring to
a subset of an image, and any pixels in the boundary of the region that happen to
coincide with the border of the image are included implicitly as part of the region
boundary.

1.3.3 Digital image file formats:

The following are some of the file formats mostly used are:

1. PPM (portable pix map) format

2. TIFF (tagged image file format)

3. GIF (graphics interchange format)

4. JPEG (joint photographic experts group) format

5. BMP (windows bitmap)

6. PNG (portable networks graphics) format

7. XWD(X windows Dump)

1.4. METHODS OF IMAGE PROCESSING

There are two methods available in Image Processing.
1.4.1 Analog Image Processing
Analog Image Processing refers to the alteration of image through electrical
means. The most common example is the television image. The television signal is a
voltage level which varies in amplitude to represent brightness through the image. By

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electrically varying the signal, the displayed image appearance is altered. The
brightness and contrast controls on a TV set serve to adjust the amplitude and reference
of the video signal, resulting in the brightening, darkening and alteration of the
brightness range of the displayed image.
1.4.2. Digital Image Processing
In this case, digital computers are used to process the image. The image will be
converted to digital form using a scanner – digitizer and then process it. It is defined as
the subjecting numerical representations of objects to a series of operations in order to
obtain a desired result. It starts with one image and produces a modified version of the
same. It is therefore a process that takes an image into another. The term digital image
processing generally refers to processing of a two-dimensional picture by a digital
computer. In a broader context, it implies digital processing of any two-dimensional
data. A digital image is an array of real numbers represented by a finite number of bits.
The principle advantage of Digital Image Processing methods is its versatility,
repeatability and the preservation of original data precision.

 The various Image Processing techniques are:

• Image representation
• Image pre-processing
• Image enhancement
• Image restoration
• Image analysis
• Image reconstruction
• Image data compression
Image Representation
An image defined in the "real world" is considered to be a function of two real
variables, for example, f(x,y) with f as the amplitude (e.g. brightness) of the image at
the real coordinate position (x,y).

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Figure 1.7: The effect of digitization

The 2D continuous image f(x,y) is divided into N rows and M columns. The
intersection of a row and a column is called as pixel. The value assigned to the integer
coordinates [m,n] with {m=0,1, 2,...,M-1} and {n=0,1,2,...,N-1} is f[m,n]. In fact, in
most cases f(x,y)--which we might consider to be the physical signal that impinges on
the face of a sensor. Typically an image file such as BMP, JPEG, TIFF etc., has some
header and picture information. A header usually includes details like format identifier
(typically first information), resolution, number of bits/pixel, compression type, etc.

Image Pre-processing
 Scaling
The theme of the technique of magnification is to have a closer view by
magnifying or zooming the interested part in the imagery. By reduction, we can bring
the unmanageable size of data to a manageable limit. For resampling an image Nearest
Neighborhood, Linear, or cubic convolution techniques are used.

 Rotation
Rotation is used in image mosaic, image registration etc. One of the techniques
of rotation is 3-pass shear rotation, where rotation matrix can be decomposed into three
separable matrices.

3-pass shear rotation

R = | cosα –sinα | =

| sinα cosα |
| 1 –tanα/2 | | 1 0 | | 1 –tanα/2|

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| 0 1 | | sinα 1| | 0 1 |

 Advantages

1. No scaling – no associated resampling degradations.

2. Shear can be implemented very efficiently.

 Mosaic

Mosaic is a process of combining two or more images to form a single large

image without radiometric imbalance. Mosaic is required to get the synoptic view of
the entire area, otherwise capture as small images.

Image enhancement techniques

Sometimes image obtained from satellites and conventional and digital cameras
lack in contrast and brightness because of the limitations of imaging sub systems and
illumination conditions while capturing image. Images may have different types of
noise. In image enhancement, the goal is to accentuate certain image features for
subsequent analysis or for image display. Examples include contrast and edge
enhancement, pseudo-colouring, noise filtering, sharpening, and magnifying. Image
enhancement is useful in feature extraction, image analysis and an image display. The
enhancement process itself does not increase the inherent information content in the
data. It simply emphasizes certain specified image characteristics. Enhancement
algorithms are generally interactive and application-dependent.

 some of the enhancement techniques are:

• Noise Filtering
• Histogram modification

Image Analysis
Image analysis is concerned with making quantitative measurements from an
image to produce a description of it . In the simplest form, this task could be reading a
label on a grocery item, sorting different parts on an assembly line, or measuring the

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size and orientation of blood cells in a medical image. More advanced image analysis
systems measure quantitative information and use it to make a sophisticated decision,
such as controlling the arm of a robot to move an object after identifying it or
navigating an aircraft with the aid of images acquired along its trajectory.

Image analysis techniques require extraction of certain features that aid in the
identification of the object. Segmentation techniques are used to isolate the desired
object from the scene so that measurements can be made on it subsequently.
Quantitative measurements of object features allow classification and description of the
image.

Image Restoration
Image restoration refers to removal or minimization of degradations in an
image. This includes de-blurring of images degraded by the limitations of a sensor or
its environment, noise filtering, and correction of geometric distortion or non-linearity
due to sensors.

Image is restored to its original quality by inverting the physical degradation

phenomenon such as defocus, linear motion, atmospheric degradation and additive
noise.

Image Compression

Compression is a very essential tool for archiving image data, image data transfer on
the network etc. They are various techniques available for lossy and lossless
compressions. One of most popular compression techniques, JPEG (Joint Photographic
Experts Group) uses Discrete Cosine Transformation (DCT) based compression
technique. Currently wavelet based compression techniques are used for higher
compression ratios with minimal loss of data.

Image Reconstruction from Projections

Image reconstruction from projections is a special class of image restoration

problems where a two- (or higher) dimensional object is reconstructed from several
one-dimensional projections. Each projection is obtained by projecting a parallel X-ray
(or other penetrating radiation) beam through the object. Planar projections are thus
obtained by viewing the object from many different angles. Reconstruction algorithms

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derive an image of a thin axial slice of the object, giving an inside view otherwise
unobtainable without performing extensive surgery. Such techniques are important in
medical imaging (CT scanners), astronomy, radar imaging, geological exploration, and
non-destructive testing of assemblies.

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