Digital Image Processing Technology Based on
MATLAB
Xin Meng1
1
Shandong Labor Vocational and Technical College, Jinan, China
e-mail: mengxin@sdlvtc.cn
ABSTRACT
This essay analyses the development of digital image processing
technology and the function of MATLAB. Individuals could make
a further understanding about the operation and application range
by learn the introduction. In addition, using typical examples, this
essay briefly describes its application in medical image processing,
materials research, surveillance video filtering and the role of
experiment teaching. At last, through analyzing results of
experiments, it could satisfy the demands of image analysis and
processing.
CCS Concepts
Information systems➝ Data analytics; Networks ➝ Network
simulations; Networks ➝Cloud computing; Networks ➝ In-
network processing; Networks ➝ Network monitoring; Theory
of computation ➝ Solution concepts in game theory;
Computing methodologies ➝ image compression; Applied
computing ➝ Transportation; Applied computing ➝
Transportation.
Keywords
Digital image; Image processing technology; MATLAB
1 INTRODUCTION
Digital image processing technology is a innovative technology
with the development of computer science and VLSY Very Large
Scale Integration, which has made great achievements in theory
and practical applications.
The input of image processing is low quality image, the output is
to improve the quality of the image. The commonly used image
processing methods include image enhancement, restoration,
coding, compression and so on. In the middle of the 1970s, with
the rapid development of computer science and artificial
intelligence, digital image processing technology had developed to
higher and deeper level.
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ICVR 2018, February 24–26, 2018, Hong Kong, Hong Kong
© 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-6408-9/18/02…$15.00
https://doi.org/10.1145/3198910.3234654
79
Under this circumstance, People have begun to study how to use
the computer system to interpret images, which is familiar with
the human visual system to understand the outside world. The
above technology is called image understanding and computer
vision.
The development of digital image processing technology began in
the early 1990s. Since 1986, with the development of wavelet
theory and transformation method, the digital processing
technology overcomes the shortcomings of analysis, and is
regarded as the crystallization of harmonic analysis for half a
century. In 1988, Mallat effectively applied the wavelet analysis in
image decomposition and reconstruction. To date, with the rapid
development of digital image processing technology, it has been
widely used in image communication, geographic information
system, office automation system, medical equipment and etc.,
due to its good re-productivity, high accuracy, wide applicability
and other advantages. Because of its powerful matrix computing
ability, MATLAB could better play the characteristics of digital
images when processing images. In this paper, based on
MATLAB, combined with examples, the application of image
processing is briefly introduced.
2. THE INTRODUCTION OF MATLAB
2.1 Background
MATLAB is a numerical calculation and visualization software
developed by Math Works, combing numerical analysis, matrix
computation, signal processing and graphical display. In addition,
according to different application fields, MATLAB adds more
than 30 specialized toolbox, such as signal processing, control
system, neural network, image processing, wavelet analysis,
robust control, nonlinear control design, system identification,
optimization design, statistical analysis, finance, spline,
communication etc., which are designed by professionals. The
digital image in MATLAB is represented in matrix forms, which
means that the powerful matrix operation ability of MATLAB is
very useful for image processing.
2.2 The advantages and disadvantages
The advantages of software mainly include the following
aspects:
1 Powerful and extensible. MATLAB not only provides powerful
functions, such as scientific computing, data analysis and
visualization, system simulation, but also has scalability
characteristics. The functions in each toolbox can be called each
other, or can be changed by the requirements of users. MATLAB
supports the secondary development of functions, and applications
can be added to the toolbox as a new tool.
2 Efficient encoding. MATLAB is very powerful, and a statement
could conduct very complicated tasks. It greatly speeds up the
efficiency of engineering technicians. Source codes in MATLAB
are equivalent to 700 thousand C codes, which simplifies the
image processing procedure.
The disadvantages of software mainly include the following
aspects:
1 MATLAB is an interpretive language, so that its efficiency
is low in specific fields, such as automatic control, signal
processing and etc..
2 MATLAB cannot operate with its environment, so that it
cannot be adopted by developers as a business software.
Figure 1: The conversion among different image types
2.4 Image Processing Method of MATLAB
MATLAB could realize the segmentation and enhancement of
images. The features in images and useful information could be
detected through gray level processing, binary processing and
filtering processing. This paper analyses the powerful image
processing function of MATLAB from the medical image
processing, metallographic materials study and experimental
teaching perspectives.
3. EXAMPLES OF MATLAB
APPLICATIO
3.1 The Application of Medical Image
Processing
In recent years, many digital medical imaging equipment
being used in clinic, has produced a lot of medical images,
which has mechanisms of divers, complex data structure and
large data volume. The realization of medical image
processing and analysis is the premise and basis of radiation
medical diagnosis, so that it is of great significance and
value.
Nowadays, most of the medical imaging devices conform to
the DI-COM310 standard. The Image Processing Toolbox in
MATLAB has the function of DICOM format reading and
analysis, as well as the Analyze 715 and Interfile formats.
Therefore, in MATLAB (R2006b) environment, the medical
image processing function could be adopted directly without
the caring about image format, read and write, display and
other technical details. And professionals could concentrated
on medical image processing and analysis combined with
80
3 The source codes of program could be directly seen, which
is bad for the confidentiality of algorithms and data.
2.3 Image types MATLAB support
An image in MATLAB may contain a data matrix, or a color
mapping table matrix. In detail, there are four basic image types in
MATLAB, respectively are index image, gray image, RGB image
and binary image. Besides, MATLAB also supports the image
sequence, which is composed of multi-frame images. The
conversion relations among different image types are shown in
Fig.1.
the powerful MATLAB data processing capability and
related toolbox.
To deal with the DICOM format using MATLAB, DICOM
(info) function and dicom read() function are used to judge
and read the image. Secondly, the image data is displayed in
maximum display range by transforming the image data to a
linear data. By adjusting the window width and position
dynamically, the whole medical image information could be
observed. According to the needs of image analysis,
different images could be displayed by adjusting the display
range or moving the mouse. The effect of image display is
shown in Fig.2.
Figure 2: The effect of image display
In addition to the image display, MATLAB could also be
used to image format conversion. The method is to use the
reading function to read the image file into the workspace,
and then use the write function to save the image file into
appropriate format. Therefore, it is convenient to realize
conversions among different medical image formats so as to
facilitate the transmission and application of medical image.
If the data format is inconsistent with the specified image
information, it is convenient for us to convert it to the
corresponding data format. Specific data formats are shown
TABLE I. VARIABLE PARAMETER OF FUNCTION
Items
Endim
VR
Compression Mode
Transfer Syntax
Dictionary
Write Private
Create Mode
3.2 The Application in Materials Research
MATLAB graphic toolbox is developed from the
simple point, line processing to 2D and 3D image
processing, and could complete several processing, such
as coloring, blanking, light and so on. In addition,
MATLAB graphic toolbox has more than 100 functions,
such as image format conversion, image file I/O and
display, linear filtering, image statistical analysis, image
enhancement, image morphological analysis, binary image
processing and etc.. Obviously, MATLAB graphic toolbox
are fully capable of casting filling processing,
solidification processing analysis, post visual processing
and quantitative metallographical analysis, enhancing the
efficiency of workers.
If the filling and solidification processing of numerical
simulation calculation has been completed, the
quantitative metallographical analysis should be carried on
focusing on the visualization processing. At first, the
original image is read and converted into a gray image
through image enhancement, filtering and edge detection.
And then the gray image is transformed into binary image
by choosing a appropriate threshold. In addition, the
binary image is managed by graphic processing, such as
the feature extraction and operation. n (n>20) row vector
or n column vector is taken randomly to calculate the
number of elements in the vector, and the point fraction
When processing a specific region in an image, MATLAB
provides 4 functions to support the selection, filtering and
filling of a specific region.
1 roipoly: Selecting and canceling a polygon area with
left mouse button, Delete and Space button, and entering
Enter to confirm;
2 roicolor (A, low, high): Selecting the region of gray
range [low high] from A area;
3 roifilt2 (h, A, BW): Filtering the selected region from
A area;
4 roifill (A): Selecting a filled polygon area with mouse
button, Delete and Space button, and entering Enter to
confirm.
According to the actual needs of the above image matrix
after treatment, appropriate number of rows and columns are
selected randomly, and then the number of elements in these
rows and columns are calculated so as to obtain the point
fraction PP, as well as line fraction PL and area fraction PA.
At last, the 3D characteristic parameters calculated using the
stereological formula in accordance with the above
parameters. The final effect picture is shown in Fig.5.
81
in Tab.1.
Description
Byte file storage: big or little
Data types indication: explicit or implicit
Image compression types: JPEG, RLE or none
Data transmission protocol: dicomwrite, Endim, VR
DICOM data dictionary containing private data
Writing private data: true or false
Create or copy
PP as well as the line fraction PL and area faction PA, is
obtained finally. Furthermore, according to the above
parameters, the 3D characteristic parameters are calculated
by the embodiment formula. At last, the metallographical
images and related graphic files are converted and stored
in hard disk.
The following section, the temperature field
visualization and quantitative metallographical analysis
are used to introduce the application of MATLAB. The
cooling simulation of a steel ball with 8mm diameter
embedded in a 10mm length metal cube is conducted by
MATLAB. The initial temperature of the steel ball is
550Deg., and the air temperature and initial metal
temperature are 20Deg.. The temperature nephogram and
isothermal diagram at a given moment are shown in Fig.3.
Figure 3: The temperature nephogram and isothermal
diagrams
Figure 4: binary metallographical image
3.3 The Application of Monitoring Image
Filtering
In the process of traffic accident image processing,
photography and camera are often used. And the stereo
vision measurement is an important development direction
of traffic accident scene investigation, which requires an
accurate quality. In the image acquisition module, when
using CCD camera to collect images, the quality of acquired
image might be degraded compared with the original image,
due to the target image is distorted or fuzzy. In addition,
because the traffic accident is difficult to detected and
restored, it is essential to remove the noise of image so as to
ensure the field research and photogrammetry. Therefore, it
is necessary to study the filtering characteristics of vehicle
images in a reasonable approach.
The image is a 2D continuous function in theory. When
conducting the image processing in computer, the first
mission is to digitalize the space and brightness of image,
and discrete it into M×N digital image. Obviously, using
matrix to describe the digital image is the most intuitive and
convenient method to conduct image processing. The image
processing toolbox consists of a set of functions that support
image processing operations, such as index images, gray
images, binary images, RGB images and multi-frame
images.
Common filters include mean filter, median filter and
Wiener filter. The former two filters belong to the spatial
filter, and wiener filter belongs to an adaptive frequency
filter. Based on the experimental results, the filtering effect
of mean filter is better than median filter, due to the mean
filter could maintain the original image features and levels.
Therefore, in vehicle image filtering, the mean filter should
be the first choice.
Wavelet transformation is a multi-scale analysis, which has
the characteristics of multi-resolution analysis, and could be
used to describe the local characteristics of signal in time-
frequency domain. In addition, it is a time-frequency
localization analysis with fixed window size, variable shape,
time and frequency window, which means it has higher
frequency and time resolution in the low frequency parts,
and has higher time resolution and lower frequency
resolution in the high frequency parts. The image denoising
processing designed in this essay is as follows:
1 Wavelet decomposition of 2D signals. Selecting a
hierarchical N of the wavelet decomposition, and calculating
the signal S into the N layer.
2 Quantizing the threshold of high frequency coefficients.
Quantizing the threshold of high frequency coefficients in
each layer.
3 Reconstruction 2D wavelet. Reconstructing the 2D
wavelet in accordance with the low frequency coefficients in
N layer and modified high frequency coefficients from 1 to
N layers.
Diagram comparison before and after the treatment is
shown in Fig.5.
Figure 5: Diagram comparison before and after the
treatment
4 CONCLUSIONS
MATLAB could assist individuals to achieve image
processing and analysis through a few simple MATLAB
commands and tools. Most of the image processing could be
programmed by the basic functions of MATLAB. In
addition, MATLAB toolbox is a powerful mathematical
82
method, which effectively promotes the digital image
processing and related research.
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