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IMAGE PROCESSING
INTRODUCTION
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cImage 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 spacecrafts, 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¶s etc.
Image Processing is used in various applications such as:
c Remote Sensing
c Medical Imaging
c Non-destructive Evaluation
c Forensic Studies
c Textiles
c Material Science.
c Military
c Film industry
c Document processing
c Graphic arts
c Printing Industry

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The simplest spatial domain operations occur when the neighbourhood
is simply the pixel itself
In this case a is referred to as a grey level transformation function or a
point processing operation
Point processing operations take the form


a



where refers to the processed image pixel value and  refers to the
original image pixel value .






 
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Neighbourhood processing may be considered as an extension of this,

where a function is applied to a neighbourhood of each pixel.
The idea is to move a ³mask´ a rectangle (usually with sides of odd
length) or other shape over the given image. As we do this, we create a
new image whose pixels have grey values calculated from the grey
values under the mask.

We now multiply and add:


A diagram illustrating the process for performing spatial Filtering
Spatial filtering thus requires three steps:
1. position the mask over the current pixel,
2. form all products of filter elements with the corresponding elements
of the neighbourhood,
3. add up all the products.
This must be repeated for every pixel in the image.
Allied to spatial filtering is spatial convolution. The method for
performing a convolution is the same as that for filtering, except that the
filter must be rotated by before multiplying and adding. Using the m(i,j)
and p(i,j) notation as before, the output of a convolution with a 3*5
mask for a single pixel is


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Sampling refers to the process of digitizing a continuous function. Image
Acquisition Toolbox enables you to acquire images and video from
cameras and frame grabbers directly into MATLAB . You can detect
hardware automatically and configure hardware properties. Advanced
workflows let you trigger acquisition while processing in-the-loop,
perform background acquisition, and synchronize sampling across
several multimodal devices. With support for multiple hardware vendors
and industry standards, you can use imaging devices ranging from
inexpensive Web cameras to high-end scientific and industrial devices
that meet low-light, high-speed, and other challenging requirements.

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It is convenient to subdivide different image processing algorithms into
broad subclasses. There are different algorithms for different tasks and
problems, and often we would like to distinguish the nature of the task at
hand.

#$&'#& &- This refers to processing an image so that the

result is more suitable for a particular application.
Example include:
ëc sharpening or de-blurring an out of focus image,
ëc highlighting edges,
ëc improving image contrast, or brightening an image,
ëc removing noise.

#$%!%#!&-This may be considered as reversing the damage

done to an image by a known cause, for example:
ëc removing of blur caused by linear motion,
ëc removal of optical distortions,
ëc removing periodic interference.


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#$$&#!&-This involves subdividing an image into

constituent parts, or isolating certain aspects of an image:
ëc finding lines, circles, or particular shapes in an image,
ëc in an aerial photograph, identifying cars, trees, buildings, or roads.
These classes are not disjoint; a given algorithm may be used for both
image enhancement or for image restoration. However, we should be
able to decide what it is that we are trying to do with our image: simply
make it look better (enhancement), or removing damage (restoration).





 
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The Image Processing Toolbox extends the basic capabilities of Matlab
by providing a number of specialized I/O, display, and processing
functions for images and image processing. Type "help images" at the
Matlab prompt to get a listing of the functions available.

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An image is stored as a matrix using standard Matlab matrix
conventions. There are five basic types of images supported by Matlab:

1.cIndexed images
2.cIntensity images
3.cBinary images
4.cRGB images
5.c8-bit images

To learn the specifics of each of these, see the Image Processing

Toolbox manual. These image types are primarily for the purpose of
display. They do not constrain the values of an image that can be
processed using general image processing techniques in Matlab. An
exception is uint8, the data type for 8-bit images. See "help uint8" for

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more details. Ordinarily, image coordinates use the same conventions as

matrix coordinates, with the first argument referring to row # and the
second to column #. The origin is the upper left corner of the image. In
Matlab, the origin is (1,1). When Matlab asks for x and y coordinates, x
is considered to be to the right and y is considered to be down.

 
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The Image Processing Toolbox provides

functions imread and imwrite that will read and write several standard
image types. Type "help imread" and "help imwrite" to get more
information.

 
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To set the default color map, use color map. Ordinarily, you should use
the color map gray(256) for 8-bit grayscale images. Use imshow(X) to
display images after setting a default colormap. See the help
on imshow for other usages. To force the window to make one screen
pixel the same size as one image pixel, use true size. You can display
multiple images by either creating multiple figures with the
figure command or by putting multiple images in the same figure with
the subplot command.

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ëc Be sure to use.* instead of * when you're multiplying two images
together point-by-point. Otherwise, Matlab will do a matrix
multiplication of the two, which will take forever and result in total
nonsense.
ëc Be sure not to forget the semicolon at the end of a command.
Otherwise, you may sit for awhile watching all the pixel values
from the resulting image scroll by on the screen!
ëc Do not use for loops unless absolutely necessarily. The use
of for loops will make your programs take , ' longer.

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Sometimes it is convenient to represent an image as a vector rather than
as a matrix. If I is an image in matrix form,
Iv = I(:);
will create a vector Iv whose entries are the stacked columns of I. To
stack rows, type
It = I'; Iv = It(:);
or
reshape(I¶, length(I(:)),1);
To return a vector to matrix form, use reshape.

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If you want to divide an image into blocks and process each block
individually, you can use the function blkproc. This function will allow
you to process distinct blocks as well as overlapping blocks. With a little
creativity, this function can be used to eliminate many loops that would
otherwise be necessary. Some related functions are im2col, col2iml,
and colfilt.

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There are a number of functions that take other functions as arguments

and apply them in a specific way to an image.
See blkproc, nlfilter, colfilt, and mfilter2 for details.

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Matlab 5.0 allows you to create and manipulate N-dimensional arrays. In

most cases, the syntax is a straightforward extension of matrix syntax.
For example, to create a 3x3x2 array of ones, use
x = ones (3,3,2);

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image Create and display image object
imagesc Scale data and display as image
imshow Display image in a MATLAB figure window
imtool Display image in the Image Viewer
dicomread Read a DICOM image
dicomwrite Write a DICOM image
imfinfo Return information about image file
imread Read image file
imwrite Write image file
imcrop Crop image
imresize Resize image
imrotate Rotate image
imtransform Apply 2-D spatial transformation to image
makeresampler Create resampling structure
maketform Create geometric transformation structure
reshape Reshape array
roipoly Select polygonal region of interest
entropy Entropy of an intensity image
corr2 Compute 2-D correlation coefficient
imhist Display histogram of image data
mean2 Compute mean of matrix elements

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imadjust Adjust image intensity values or colormap

imnoise Add noise to an image
medfilt2 Perform 2-D median filtering
ordfilt2 Perform 2-D order-statistic filtering
wiener2 Perform 2-D adaptive noise-removal filtering

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