Digital Image Processing Technology Based on

MATLAB
Xin Meng1
1
Shandong Labor Vocational and Technical College, Jinan, China
e-mail: [email protected]

ABSTRACT
This essay analyses the development of digital image processing Under this circumstance, People have begun to study how to use
technology and the function of MATLAB. Individuals could make the computer system to interpret images, which is familiar with
a further understanding about the operation and application range the human visual system to understand the outside world. The
by learn the introduction. In addition, using typical examples, this above technology is called image understanding and computer
essay briefly describes its application in medical image processing, vision.
materials research, surveillance video filtering and the role of
experiment teaching. At last, through analyzing results of The development of digital image processing technology began in
experiments, it could satisfy the demands of image analysis and the early 1990s. Since 1986, with the development of wavelet
processing. 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
CCS Concepts century. In 1988, Mallat effectively applied the wavelet analysis in
Information systems➝ Data analytics; Networks ➝ Network image decomposition and reconstruction. To date, with the rapid
simulations; Networks ➝Cloud computing; Networks ➝ In- development of digital image processing technology, it has been
network processing; Networks ➝ Network monitoring; Theory widely used in image communication, geographic information
of computation ➝ Solution concepts in game theory; system, office automation system, medical equipment and etc.,
Computing methodologies ➝ image compression; Applied due to its good re-productivity, high accuracy, wide applicability
computing ➝ Transportation; Applied computing ➝ and other advantages. Because of its powerful matrix computing
Transportation. ability, MATLAB could better play the characteristics of digital
images when processing images. In this paper, based on
Keywords MATLAB, combined with examples, the application of image
processing is briefly introduced.
Digital image; Image processing technology; MATLAB

1 INTRODUCTION 2. THE INTRODUCTION OF MATLAB

Digital image processing technology is a innovative technology 2.1 Background
with the development of computer science and VLSY Very Large MATLAB is a numerical calculation and visualization software
Scale Integration, which has made great achievements in theory developed by Math Works, combing numerical analysis, matrix
and practical applications. computation, signal processing and graphical display. In addition,
The input of image processing is low quality image, the output is according to different application fields, MATLAB adds more
to improve the quality of the image. The commonly used image than 30 specialized toolbox, such as signal processing, control
processing methods include image enhancement, restoration, system, neural network, image processing, wavelet analysis,
coding, compression and so on. In the middle of the 1970s, with robust control, nonlinear control design, system identification,
the rapid development of computer science and artificial optimization design, statistical analysis, finance, spline,
intelligence, digital image processing technology had developed to communication etc., which are designed by professionals. The
higher and deeper level. digital image in MATLAB is represented in matrix forms, which
means that the powerful matrix operation ability of MATLAB is
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this
very useful for image processing.
work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee
provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or 2.2 The advantages and disadvantages
commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the The advantages of software mainly include the following
full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this aspects:
work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting
with 1 Powerful and extensible. MATLAB not only provides powerful
credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on functions, such as scientific computing, data analysis and
servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific visualization, system simulation, but also has scalability
permission and/or a fee. Request characteristics. The functions in each toolbox can be called each
permissions from [email protected]. other, or can be changed by the requirements of users. MATLAB
ICVR 2018, February 24–26, 2018, Hong Kong, Hong Kong supports the secondary development of functions, and applications
© 2018 Association for Computing Machinery. can be added to the toolbox as a new tool.
ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-6408-9/18/02…$15.00
https://doi.org/10.1145/3198910.3234654

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2 Efficient encoding. MATLAB is very powerful, and a statement 3 The source codes of program could be directly seen, which
could conduct very complicated tasks. It greatly speeds up the is bad for the confidentiality of algorithms and data.
efficiency of engineering technicians. Source codes in MATLAB
are equivalent to 700 thousand C codes, which simplifies the 2.3 Image types MATLAB support
image processing procedure. An image in MATLAB may contain a data matrix, or a color
mapping table matrix. In detail, there are four basic image types in
The disadvantages of software mainly include the following MATLAB, respectively are index image, gray image, RGB image
aspects: and binary image. Besides, MATLAB also supports the image
1 MATLAB is an interpretive language, so that its efficiency sequence, which is composed of multi-frame images. The
conversion relations among different image types are shown in
is low in specific fields, such as automatic control, signal
Fig.1.
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 the powerful MATLAB data processing capability and
related toolbox.
MATLAB could realize the segmentation and enhancement of
images. The features in images and useful information could be To deal with the DICOM format using MATLAB, DICOM
detected through gray level processing, binary processing and (info) function and dicom read() function are used to judge
filtering processing. This paper analyses the powerful image and read the image. Secondly, the image data is displayed in
processing function of MATLAB from the medical image maximum display range by transforming the image data to a
processing, metallographic materials study and experimental linear data. By adjusting the window width and position
teaching perspectives. 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
3. EXAMPLES OF MATLAB shown in Fig.2.
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.
Figure 2: The effect of image display
Nowadays, most of the medical imaging devices conform to In addition to the image display, MATLAB could also be
the DI-COM310 standard. The Image Processing Toolbox in used to image format conversion. The method is to use the
MATLAB has the function of DICOM format reading and reading function to read the image file into the workspace,
analysis, as well as the Analyze 715 and Interfile formats. and then use the write function to save the image file into
Therefore, in MATLAB (R2006b) environment, the medical appropriate format. Therefore, it is convenient to realize
image processing function could be adopted directly without conversions among different medical image formats so as to
the caring about image format, read and write, display and facilitate the transmission and application of medical image.
other technical details. And professionals could concentrated If the data format is inconsistent with the specified image
on medical image processing and analysis combined with information, it is convenient for us to convert it to the

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corresponding data format. Specific data formats are shown in Tab.1.

TABLE I. VARIABLE PARAMETER OF FUNCTION

Items Description
Endim Byte file storage: big or little
VR Data types indication: explicit or implicit
Compression Mode Image compression types: JPEG, RLE or none
Transfer Syntax Data transmission protocol: dicomwrite, Endim, VR
Dictionary DICOM data dictionary containing private data
Write Private Writing private data: true or false
Create Mode Create or copy
3.2 The Application in Materials Research PP as well as the line fraction PL and area faction PA, is
MATLAB graphic toolbox is developed from the obtained finally. Furthermore, according to the above
simple point, line processing to 2D and 3D image parameters, the 3D characteristic parameters are calculated
processing, and could complete several processing, such by the embodiment formula. At last, the metallographical
as coloring, blanking, light and so on. In addition, images and related graphic files are converted and stored
MATLAB graphic toolbox has more than 100 functions, in hard disk.
such as image format conversion, image file I/O and
display, linear filtering, image statistical analysis, image The following section, the temperature field
enhancement, image morphological analysis, binary image visualization and quantitative metallographical analysis
processing and etc.. Obviously, MATLAB graphic toolbox are used to introduce the application of MATLAB. The
are fully capable of casting filling processing, cooling simulation of a steel ball with 8mm diameter
solidification processing analysis, post visual processing embedded in a 10mm length metal cube is conducted by
and quantitative metallographical analysis, enhancing the MATLAB. The initial temperature of the steel ball is
efficiency of workers. 550Deg., and the air temperature and initial metal
If the filling and solidification processing of numerical temperature are 20Deg.. The temperature nephogram and
simulation calculation has been completed, the isothermal diagram at a given moment are shown in Fig.3.
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 Figure 3: The temperature nephogram and isothermal
or n column vector is taken randomly to calculate the diagrams
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; Figure 4: binary metallographical image
2 roicolor (A, low, high): Selecting the region of gray
range [low high] from A area;
3.3 The Application of Monitoring Image
3 roifilt2 (h, A, BW): Filtering the selected region from Filtering
A area; In the process of traffic accident image processing,
4 roifill (A): Selecting a filled polygon area with mouse photography and camera are often used. And the stereo
button, Delete and Space button, and entering Enter to vision measurement is an important development direction
confirm. of traffic accident scene investigation, which requires an
According to the actual needs of the above image matrix accurate quality. In the image acquisition module, when
after treatment, appropriate number of rows and columns are using CCD camera to collect images, the quality of acquired
selected randomly, and then the number of elements in these image might be degraded compared with the original image,
rows and columns are calculated so as to obtain the point due to the target image is distorted or fuzzy. In addition,
fraction PP, as well as line fraction PL and area fraction PA. because the traffic accident is difficult to detected and
At last, the 3D characteristic parameters calculated using the restored, it is essential to remove the noise of image so as to
stereological formula in accordance with the above ensure the field research and photogrammetry. Therefore, it
parameters. The final effect picture is shown in Fig.5. is necessary to study the filtering characteristics of vehicle
images in a reasonable approach.

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The image is a 2D continuous function in theory. When method, which effectively promotes the digital image
conducting the image processing in computer, the first processing and related research.
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 5. REFERENCES
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