CS401

COMPUTER GRAPHICS

Fundamental Steps in Digital

Image Processing
Module VI
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Figure 1.23
 Fundamental Steps in Digital Image
Processing
● It is helpful to divide the material covered in the
following chapters into the two broad categories
defined in Section 1.1: methods whose input
and output are images, and methods whose
inputs may be images, but whose outputs are
attributes extracted from those images. This
organization is summarized in Fig. 1.23. The
diagram does not imply that every process is
applied to an image. Rather, the intention is to
convey an idea of all the methodologies that
can be applied to images for different purposes
and possibly with different objectives.
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1 Fundamental Steps in Digital Image
Processing
● Image acquisition is the first process shown in
Fig. 1.23.
➔ Note that acquisition could be as simple as
being given an image that is already in digital
form.
➔ For instance, an image is captured using a
camera and it is digitized so that it can be
processed.
➔ Generally, the image acquisition stage involves
preprocessing, such as scaling.
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2 Fundamental Steps in Digital Image
Processing
● Image enhancement is among the simplest and
most appealing areas of digital image
processing. Basically, the idea behind
enhancement techniques is to bring out detail
that is obscured, or simply to highlight certain
features of interest in an image.
➔ A familiar example of enhancement is when we
increase the contrast of an image because "it
looks better."
➔ It is important to keep in mind that enhancement
is a very subjective area of image processing.
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 Fundamental Steps in Digital Image
Processing
➔ The principal objective of enhancement is to
improve the quality of an image or process an
image so that the result is more suitable than
the original image for a specific application.

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 Fundamental Steps in Digital Image
Processing
➔ Image enhancement approaches fall into two
broad categories: spatial domain methods and
frequency domain methods.
The term spatial domain refers to the image
plane itself, and approaches in this category
are based on direct manipulation of pixels in an
image.
Frequency domain processing techniques are
based on modifying the Fourier transform of an
image.

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3 Fundamental Steps in Digital Image
Processing
● Image restoration is an area that also deals
with improving the appearance of an image.
➔ However, unlike enhancement, which is
subjective, image restoration is objective, in the
sense that restoration techniques tend to be
based on mathematical or probabilistic models
of image degradation.
➔ Enhancement on the other hand, is based on
human subjective preferences regarding what
constitutes a "good" enhancement result.

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 Fundamental Steps in Digital Image
Processing
➔ Restoration attempts to reconstruct or recover
an image that has been degraded, by using a
priori knowledge of the degradation
phenomenon. Thus restoration techniques are
oriented toward modeling the degradation and
applying the inverse process in order to recover
the original image.

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4 Fundamental Steps in Digital Image
Processing
● Color image processing is an area that has been
gaining in importance because of the significant
increase in the use of digital images over the
Internet.
➔ This stage involves processing of color images.
This may include color modeling and processing
in a digital domain like color-image quantization,
gamma correction of color image etc.
➔ Color image processing is divided into two major
areas: full-color image processing and pseudo-
color image processing.
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 Fundamental Steps in Digital Image
Processing
➔ Color is used as the basis for extracting
features of interest in an image. Color is a
powerful descriptor that often simplifies object
identification and extraction from a scene.
➔ Color models provide a standard way to specify
a particular color. Few available color models
are RGB (Red, Green, Blue) color model, CMY
(Cyan, Magenta, Yellow) color model, CMYK
(Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) color model,
HSI (Hue, Saturation, Intensity) color model etc.

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5 Fundamental Steps in Digital Image
Processing
● Wavelets are the foundation for representing
images in various degrees of resolution. Wavelets
are used for image data compression and for
pyramidal representation, in which images are
subdivided successively into smaller regions.
➔ Wavelet transforms are based on small localised
waves, called wavelets, of varying frequency and
limited duration. The wavelet transform was
developed to overcome the shortcomings of the
Fourier transform. Wavelet transform allow multi-
resolution analysis of an image.
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 Fundamental Steps in Digital Image
Processing
➔ As its name implies, multiresolution processing is
concerned with the representation and analysis of
images at more than one resolution. Multi-resolution
offers an efficient framework for extracting information
from images at various levels of resolution. The appeal of
such an approach is obvious — features that might go
undetected at one resolution may be easy to spot at
another resolution.
➔ If the objects are small in size or low in contrast, we
normally examine them at high resolutions; if they are
large in size or high in contrast, a coarse view is all that
is required. If both small and large objects — or low and
high contrast objects — are present simultaneously, it
can be advantageous to study them at several
resolutions. This, of course, is the fundamental
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motivation for multiresolution processing.
 Fundamental Steps in Digital Image
Processing
➔ A powerful, but conceptually simple structure
for representing images at more than one
resolution is the image pyramid. An image
pyramid is a collection of decreasing resolution
images arranged in the shape of a pyramid.
The base of the pyramid contains a high-
resolution representation of the image being
processed; the apex contains a low-resolution
approximation.

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6 Fundamental Steps in Digital Image
Processing
● Compression, as the name implies, deals with
techniques for reducing the storage required to save
an image or the bandwidth required to transmit it.
➔ Although storage technology has improved
significantly over the past decade, the same cannot be
said for transmission capacity. This is true particularly
in uses of the Internet, which are characterized by
significant pictorial content.
➔ Image compression is familiar (perhaps inadvertently)
to most users of computers in the form of image file
extensions, such as the jpg file extension used in the
JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) image
compression standard.
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 Fundamental Steps in Digital Image
Processing
➔ Particularly in the uses of Internet which are
characterized by significant pictorial content, it
is very much necessary to compress data.
➔ In digital image compression, three basic data
redundancies can be identified and exploited:
coding redundancy, interpixel redundancy, and
psychovisual redundancy. Data compression is
achieved when one or more of these
redundancies are reduced or eliminated.

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 Fundamental Steps in Digital Image
Processing
➔ Compression techniques fall into two broad categories:
information preserving (loss less) and lossy.
Methods in the first category are particularly useful in
image archiving (as in the storage of legal or medical
records). These methods allow an image to be
compressed and decompressed without losing
information.
Methods in the second category provide higher levels of
data reduction but result in a less than perfect
reproduction of the original image. Lossy image
compression is useful in applications such as broadcast
television, video-conferencing, and facsimile
transmission, in which a certain amount of error is an
acceptable trade-off for increased compression
performance. 17
7 Fundamental Steps in Digital Image
Processing
● Morphological processing deals with tools for
extracting image components that are useful in
the representation and description of region
shape, such as boundaries, skeletons, and the
convex hull.
➔ Erosion and dilation are operations that are
fundamental to morphological processing.
➔ Erosion shrinks or thins objects in a binary image.
In fact, we can view erosion as a morphological
filtering operation in which image details smaller
than the structuring element are filtered (re-
moved) from the image. 18
 Fundamental Steps in Digital Image
Processing
➔ Unlike erosion, which is a shrinking or thinning
operation, dilation "grows" or "thickens" objects
in a binary image. The specific manner and ex-
tent of this thickening is controlled by the shape
of the structuring element used.

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8 Fundamental Steps in Digital Image
Processing
● Segmentation procedures partition an image into its
constituent parts (regions) or objects.
➔ In general, autonomous segmentation is one of the
most difficult tasks in digital image processing.
➔ A rugged segmentation procedure brings the
process a long way toward successful solution of
imaging problems that require objects to be
identified individually.
➔ On the other hand, weak or erratic segmentation
algorithms almost always guarantee eventual failure.
➔ In general, the more accurate the segmentation, the
more likely recognition is to succeed.
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 Fundamental Steps in Digital Image
Processing
➔ Most of the segmentation algorithms are based
on one of two basic properties of intensity
values: discontinuity and similarity.
In the first category, the approach is to partition
an image based on abrupt changes in intensity,
such as edges.
The principal approaches in the second
category are based on partitioning an image
into regions that are similar according to a set
of predefined criteria. Thresholding, region
growing, and region splitting and merging are
examples of methods in this category. 21
9 Fundamental Steps in Digital Image
Processing
● Representation and description almost always follow the
output of a segmentation stage, which usually is raw pixel
data, constituting either the boundary of a region (i.e., the
set of pixels separating one image region from another) or
all the points in the region itself.
➔ In either case, converting the data to a form suitable for
computer processing is necessary. The first decision that
must be made is whether the data should be represented
as a boundary or as a complete region.
➔ Boundary representation is appropriate when the focus is
on external shape characteristics, such as corners and
inflections.
➔ Regional representation is appropriate when the focus is
on internal properties such as texture or skeletal shape. 22
 Fundamental Steps in Digital Image
Processing
➔ In some applications, these representations
complement each other. Choosing a
representation is only part of the solution for
transforming raw data into a form suitable for
subsequent computer processing.
➔ A method must also be specified for describing
the data so that features of interest are
highlighted. Description, also called feature
selection, deals with extracting attributes that
result in some quantitative information of
interest or are basic for differentiating one class
of objects from another. 23
10 Fundamental Steps in Digital Image
Processing
● Recognition is the process that assigns a label
(e.g., "vehicle") to an object based on its
descriptors.

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11 Fundamental Steps in Digital Image
Processing
● So far we have said nothing about the need for prior
knowledge or about the interaction between the knowledge
base and the processing modules in Fig. 1.23.
➔ Knowledge about a problem domain is coded into an image
processing system in the form of a knowledge database.
➔ This knowledge may be as simple as detailing regions of
an image where the information of interest is known to be
located, thus limiting the search that has to be conducted in
seeking that information.
➔ The knowledge base also can be quite complex, such as
an interrelated list of all major possible defects in a
materials inspection problem or an image database
containing high-resolution satellite images of a region in
connection with change-detection applications.
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 Fundamental Steps in Digital Image
Processing
➔ In addition to guiding the operation of each
processing module, the knowledge base also
controls the interaction between modules. This
distinction is made in Fig. 1.23 by the use of
double-headed arrows between the processing
modules and the knowledge base, as opposed
to single-headed arrows linking the processing
modules.

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 Fundamental Steps in Digital Image
Processing
● Although we do not discuss image display explicitly
at this point, it is important to keep in mind that
viewing the results of image processing can take
place at the output of any stage in Fig. 1.23.
● We also note that not all image processing
applications require the complexity of interactions
implied by Fig. 1.23. In fact, not even all those
modules are needed in some cases. For example,
image enhancement for human visual interpretation
seldom requires use of any of the other stages in
Fig. 1.23. In general, however, as the complexity of
an image processing task increases, so does the
number of processes required to solve the problem. 27