paper6

Digital Image Processing

G.SWETHA(EC E IIIRD YEAR)

NIKHIL GUPTA(EC E IIIRD YEAR)

Department of Electronics and C ommunications

ni khil.gupta9@yahoo.com

gswetha_cool@yahoo.co.in

Abstract: In the age of multimedia images have become an integrated part of human life. No
other medium can offer the expressive power of the image or a video sequence, because images
contain an enormous amount of information. Drawing or photo of a complex technical would
dramatically change the clarification and simplification of the task of description. At a glance one
can grasp much more from an image than from a descriptive text. Clearly, images contain and
convey information in the form, which human beings can easily process. Visual system allows to
handle an enormous amount of data in a very short time. It is now possible to integrate anything
into an image using image processing techniques. Image processing has taken rapid strides since
the invention of computer. Image processing is no longer confined to large industries and large
scientific labs. One can sit at his own desk in front of his personal computer and process images.
This paper aims in gaining the basic concept involved in digital image processing without much of
mathematics involved. Starting from the definition of image it briefly covers the structure of digital
image, steps and tools involved in digital image processing and applications.

What are Images?

Images are signals with special characteristics. They are a measure of a parameter over space
(distance), while most signals are a measure of a parameter over tim e. For example, standard
visual images result from light intensity variations across a two-dimensional plane. However, light
is not the only parameter used in scientific imaging. For example, an image can be formed of the
temperature of an integrated circuit, blood velocity in a patient's artery, x-ray emission from a
distant galaxy, ground motion during an earthquake, etc. These exotic images are usually
converted into conventional pictures (i.e., light images), so that they can be evaluated by the
human eye. They contain a great deal of information. For example, more than 10 megabytes
required to store one second of television video. This is more than a thousand times greater than
for a similar length voice signal. The final judge of quality is often a subjective human evaluation,
rather than an objective criterion. These special characteristics have made image processing a
distinct subgroup within Digital Signal Processing (DSP).

Digital Image Structure:

A digital image a [ m ,n ] described in a 2D discrete space is derived from an analog image a(x ,
y) in a 2D continuous space through a sampling process that is frequently referred to as
digitization. The 2D continuous image a(x , y) is divided into N rows and M columns. The
intersection of a row and a column is termed a pixel . Each pixel in the example shown is a single
number between 0 and 255. To display the analog image as a digital image , the value of each
pixel is converted into a grayscale , where 0 is black, 255 is white, and the intermediate values
are shades of gray. C olor is added to digital images by using three numbers for each pixel,
representing the intensity of the three primary colors: red, green and blue. Mixing these three
colors generates all possible colors that the human eye can perceive. A single byte is frequently
used to store each of the color intensities, allowing the image to capture a total of 256×256×256
= 16.8 million different colors.

Digital Image Processing

Digital image processing is electronic data processing on a 2-D array of numbers. The array is a
numeric representation of an image . An image processing system consists of a source of image
data, a processing element and a destination for the processed results.

Steps and Tools :

After obtaining the digitized image by the process of digitization the image is sent for image
processing. Image processing operations can be roughly divided into three major categories,
Image C ompression , Image Enhancement and Restoration , and Measurement Extraction .

Image Compression:

As a result of digitization of an average size document at a medium resolution and color depth, a
huge file of average size of about 20-50MB is produced. The quality of such an image is high, but
the transmission time, the computational burden and the hardware requirements are simply
enormous. Also the bandwidth of the transmission line required to transmit the information would
be very large. Thus image compression is necessary. Some of the major compression techniques
which can be used when transmitting or storing digital images are GIF ( Graphics Interchage
Format ), PNG ( Portable Network Graphics ), JBIG ( Joint Bilevel Group ) and JPEG ( Joint
Photographers Expert Group ). Various new techniques are also being devised for quick
transmission and efficient compression.

Image Enhancement and Restoration:

The following examples of Image Enhancement and Measurement Extraction all operate on 256
gray-scale images. These operations can be extended to operate on color images.

The image at the left has been corrupted by noise during the digitization process. The 'clean'
image at the right was obtained by applying a median filter to the image.

An image with poor contrast, such as the one at the left can be improved by adjusting the image
histogram to produce the image shown at the right.

The image at the top left of the following figure has a corrugated effect due to a fault in the
acquisition process. This can be removed by doing a 2-dimensional Fast-Fourier Transform on the
image (top right of the figure), removing the bright spots (bottom left of the following figure), and
finally doing an inverse Fast Fourier Transform to return to the original image without the
corrugated background bottom right of the figure).

An image which has been captured in poor lighting conditions, and shows a continuous change in
the background brightness across the image (top left of the following figure) can be corrected
using the following procedure. First remove the foreground objects by applying a 25 by 25
grayscale dilation operation (top right of the figure). Then subtract the original image from the
background image (bottom left of the figure). Finally invert the colors and improve the contrast by
adjusting the image histogram (bottom right of the figure) .

Measurement Extraction :

The example below demonstrates how one could go about extracting measurements from an
image. The image at the top left of the following figure shows some objects. The aim is to extract
information about the distribution of the sizes (visible areas) of the objects. The first step involves
segmenting the image to separate the objects of interest from the background. This usually
involves thresholding the image, which is done by setting the values of pixels above a certain
threshold value to white, and all the others to black (top right of the figure). Because the objects
touch, thresholding at a level which includes the full surface of all the objects does not show
separate objects. This problem is solved by performing a watershed separation on the image
(lower left of the figure). The image at the lower right of the figure shows the result of performing
a logical AND of the two images at the left of the figure. This shows the effect that the watershed
separation has on touching objects in the original image. Finally, some measurements can be
extracted from the image. The histogram shows the distribution of the area measurements. The
areas were calculated based on the assumption that the width of the image is 28 cm.

Tools:

C ertain mathematical tools are central to the processing of digital images. They are convolution,
fourier analysis, and statistical descriptions and manipulative tools such as chain codes and run
codes.

Out of all the above the two most important techniques are: convolution and Fourier analysis .
C onvolution is the more important of these two, since images have their information encoded in
the spatial domain rather than the frequency domain. Linear filtering can improve images in many
ways: sharpening the edges of objects, reducing random noise, correcting for unequal
illumination, deconvolution to correct for blur and motion, etc. These procedures are carried out
by convolving the original image with an appropriate filter kernel, producing the filtered image. A
serious problem with image convolution is the enormous number of calculations that need to be
performed, often resulting in unacceptably long execution times. Two important techniques for
reducing the execution time are convolution by separability and FFT convolution .

APPLICATIONS

Applications of digital image processing in general are infinite. There are hardly any areas where
image processing is not necessary. However major applications in medicine, space are discussed
briefly:

Medical:

In 1895, Wilhelm C onrad Röntgen discovered that x-rays could pass through substantial amounts
of matter. Medicine was revolutionized by the ability to look inside the living human body. Medical
x-ray systems spread throughout the world in only a few years. In spite of its obvious success,
medical x-ray imaging was limited by four problems until DSP and related techniques came along
in the 1970s. First, overlapping structures in the body can hide behind each other. For example,
portions of the heart might not be visible behind the ribs. Second, it is not always possible to
distinguish between similar tissues. For example, it may be able to separate bone from soft
tissue, but not distinguish a tumor from the liver. Third, x-ray images show anatom y, the body's
structure, and not physiolog y, the body's operation. The x-ray image of a living person looks
exactly like the x-ray image of a dead one! Fourth, x-ray exposure can cause cancer, requiring it
to be used sparingly and only with proper justification.

The problem of overlapping structures was solved in 1971 with the introduction of the first
computed tomography scanner (formerly called computed axial tomography, or CAT scanner).
C omputed tomography (C T) is a classic example of Digital Signal Processing. X-rays from many
directions are passed through the section of the patient's body being examined. Instead of simply
forming images with the detected x-rays, the signals are converted into digital data and stored in
a computer. The information is then used to calculate images that appear to be slices through the
bod y. These images show much greater detail than conventional techniques, allowing significantly
better diagnosis and treatment. The last three x-ray problems have been solved by using
penetrating energy other than x-rays, such as radio and sound waves. DSP plays a key role in all
these techniques. For example, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) uses magnetic fields in
conjunction with radio waves to probe the interior of the human body. Properly adjusting the
strength and frequency of the fields cause the atomic nuclei in a localized region of the body to
resonate between quantum energy states. This resonance results in the emission of a secondary
radio wave, detected with an antenna placed near the body. The strength and other
characteristics of this detected signal provide information about the localized region in resonance.
Adjustment of the magnetic field allows the resonance region to be scanned throughout the body,
mapping the internal structure. This information is usually presented as images, just as in
computed tomography. Besides providing excellent discrimination between different types of soft
tissue, MRI can provide information about physiology, such as blood flow through arteries. MRI
relies totally on Digital Signal Processing techniques, and could not be implemented without them.

Space:

Sometimes, we face a situation so as to make the most out of a bad picture. This is frequently the
case with images taken from unmanned satellites and space exploration vehicles. DIP can
improve the quality of images taken under extremely unfavorable conditions in several ways:
brightness and contrast adjustment, edge detection, noise reduction, focus adjustment, motion
blur reduction, etc. Images that have spatial distortion, such as encountered when a flat image is
taken of a spherical planet, can also be warped into a correct representation. Many individual
images can also be combined into a single database, allowing the information to be displayed in
unique ways. For example, a video sequence simulating an aerial flight over the surface of a
distant planet.

Commercial Imaging Products:

The large information content in images is a problem for systems sold in mass quantity to the
general public. C ommercial systems must be chea p, and this doesn't mesh well with large
memories and high data transfer rates. One answer to this dilemma is image compressio n. Just
as with voice signals, images contain a tremendous amount of redundant information, and can be
run through algorithms that reduce the number of bits needed to represent them. Television and
other moving pictures are especially suitable for compression, since most of the image remain the
same from frame-to-frame. C ommercial imaging products that take advantage of this technology
include: video telephones, computer programs that display moving pictures, and digital television.

Conclusion

With image processing growing in varied disciplines such as remote sensing and biomedical
research, the makers of scientific software are making sure their packages include the ability to
handle image tasks. Image-processing applications tend to be so specific to individual users that it
hasn't been worthwhile for any company to develop one-size-fits-all applications. Many image
processing software are being released into the market with much more easy-to-use tools, so it's
allowing more people to attempt to do vision-processing tasks that they wouldn't even have tried
before. There is an increasing demand for 3D-image processing and for dealing with images
taken in dozens or hundreds of spectral bands. As computers get faster and imaging equipment
improves, undergraduates are being taught how to incorporate it into their work. No doubt, image
processing in software is following a track similar to what happened with digital signal processing
a decade ago.

References:

1: Neil Savage, “Spie's oe Magazine”, October 2002.

2: Steven W.Smith, “The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing”,

C alifornia Technical Publishing.

3: IanT.Young, “Image Processing Fundamentals”

4: A .Erhardt-Ferron, “Theory and Applications of Digital Image Processing”

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