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Fundamentals of Digital
Image Processing
A Practical Approach
with Examples in Matlab

Chris Solomon
School of Physical Sciences, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
Toby Breckon
School of Engineering, Cranfield University, Bedfordshire, UK
Fundamentals of Digital
Image Processing
Fundamentals of Digital
Image Processing
A Practical Approach
with Examples in Matlab

Chris Solomon
School of Physical Sciences, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
Toby Breckon
School of Engineering, Cranfield University, Bedfordshire, UK
This edition first published 2011, Ó 2011 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
Wiley-Blackwell is an imprint of John Wiley & Sons, formed by the merger of Wiley’s global Scientific,
Technical and Medical business with Blackwell Publishing.
Registered office: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester,
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For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services and for information about how to
apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at
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The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
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professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a
competent professional should be sought.
MATLABÒ is a trademark of The MathWorks, Inc. and is used with permission. The MathWorks does not warrant
the accuracy of the text or exercises in this book. This book’s use or discussion of MATLABÒ software or related
products does not constitute endorsement or sponsorship by The MathWorks of a particular pedagogical
approach or particular use of the MATLABÒ software.
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Solomon, Chris and Breckon, Toby
Fundamentals of digital image processing : a practical approach with examples in Matlab / Chris Solomon and
Toby Breckon
p. cm.
Includes index.
Summary: “Fundamentals of Digital Image Processing is an introductory text on the science of image processing
and employs the Matlab programming language to illustrate some of the elementary, key concepts in modern
image processing and pattern recognition drawing on specific examples from within science, medicine and
electronics”— Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-0-470-84472-4 (hardback) – ISBN 978-0-470-84473-1 (pbk.)
1. Image processing–Digital techniques. 2. Matlab. I. Breckon, Toby. II. Title.
TA1637.S65154 2010
621.36’7—dc22
2010025730
This book is published in the following electronic formats: eBook 9780470689783; Wiley Online Library
9780470689776
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Set in 10/12.5 pt Minion by Thomson Digital, Noida, India

1 2011
Contents

Preface xi

Using the book website xv

1 Representation 1
1.1 What is an image? 1
1.1.1 Image layout 1
1.1.2 Image colour 2
1.2 Resolution and quantization 3
1.2.1 Bit-plane splicing 4
1.3 Image formats 5
1.3.1 Image data types 6
1.3.2 Image compression 7
1.4 Colour spaces 9
1.4.1 RGB 10
1.4.1.1 RGB to grey-scale image conversion 11
1.4.2 Perceptual colour space 12
1.5 Images in Matlab 14
1.5.1 Reading, writing and querying images 14
1.5.2 Basic display of images 15
1.5.3 Accessing pixel values 16
1.5.4 Converting image types 17
Exercises 18

2 Formation 21
2.1 How is an image formed? 21
2.2 The mathematics of image formation 22
2.2.1 Introduction 22
2.2.2 Linear imaging systems 23
2.2.3 Linear superposition integral 24
2.2.4 The Dirac delta or impulse function 25
2.2.5 The point-spread function 28
vi CONTENTS

2.2.6 Linear shift-invariant systems and the convolution

integral 29
2.2.7 Convolution: its importance and meaning 30
2.2.8 Multiple convolution: N imaging elements
in a linear shift-invariant system 34
2.2.9 Digital convolution 34
2.3 The engineering of image formation 37
2.3.1 The camera 38
2.3.2 The digitization process 40
2.3.2.1 Quantization 40
2.3.2.2 Digitization hardware 42
2.3.2.3 Resolution versus performance 43
2.3.3 Noise 44
Exercises 46

3 Pixels 49
3.1 What is a pixel? 49
3.2 Operations upon pixels 50
3.2.1 Arithmetic operations on images 51
3.2.1.1 Image addition and subtraction 51
3.2.1.2 Multiplication and division 53
3.2.2 Logical operations on images 54
3.2.3 Thresholding 55
3.3 Point-based operations on images 57
3.3.1 Logarithmic transform 57
3.3.2 Exponential transform 59
3.3.3 Power-law (gamma) transform 61
3.3.3.1 Application: gamma correction 62
3.4 Pixel distributions: histograms 63
3.4.1 Histograms for threshold selection 65
3.4.2 Adaptive thresholding 66
3.4.3 Contrast stretching 67
3.4.4 Histogram equalization 69
3.4.4.1 Histogram equalization theory 69
3.4.4.2 Histogram equalization theory: discrete case 70
3.4.4.3 Histogram equalization in practice 71
3.4.5 Histogram matching 73
3.4.5.1 Histogram-matching theory 73
3.4.5.2 Histogram-matching theory: discrete case 74
3.4.5.3 Histogram matching in practice 75
3.4.6 Adaptive histogram equalization 76
3.4.7 Histogram operations on colour images 79
Exercises 81
 CONTENTS vii

4 Enhancement 85
4.1 Why perform enhancement? 85
4.1.1 Enhancement via image filtering 85
4.2 Pixel neighbourhoods 86
4.3 Filter kernels and the mechanics of linear filtering 87
4.3.1 Nonlinear spatial filtering 90
4.4 Filtering for noise removal 90
4.4.1 Mean filtering 91
4.4.2 Median filtering 92
4.4.3 Rank filtering 94
4.4.4 Gaussian filtering 95
4.5 Filtering for edge detection 97
4.5.1 Derivative filters for discontinuities 97
4.5.2 First-order edge detection 99
4.5.2.1 Linearly separable filtering 101
4.5.3 Second-order edge detection 102
4.5.3.1 Laplacian edge detection 102
4.5.3.2 Laplacian of Gaussian 103
4.5.3.3 Zero-crossing detector 104
4.6 Edge enhancement 105
4.6.1 Laplacian edge sharpening 105
4.6.2 The unsharp mask filter 107
Exercises 109

5 Fourier transforms and frequency-domain processing 113

5.1 Frequency space: a friendly introduction 113
5.2 Frequency space: the fundamental idea 114
5.2.1 The Fourier series 115
5.3 Calculation of the Fourier spectrum 118
5.4 Complex Fourier series 118
5.5 The 1-D Fourier transform 119
5.6 The inverse Fourier transform and reciprocity 121
5.7 The 2-D Fourier transform 123
5.8 Understanding the Fourier transform: frequency-space filtering 126
5.9 Linear systems and Fourier transforms 129
5.10 The convolution theorem 129
5.11 The optical transfer function 131
5.12 Digital Fourier transforms: the discrete fast Fourier transform 134
5.13 Sampled data: the discrete Fourier transform 135
5.14 The centred discrete Fourier transform 136

6 Image restoration 141

6.1 Imaging models 141
6.2 Nature of the point-spread function and noise 142
viii CONTENTS

6.3 Restoration by the inverse Fourier filter 143

6.4 The Wiener–Helstrom Filter 146
6.5 Origin of the Wiener–Helstrom filter 147
6.6 Acceptable solutions to the imaging equation 151
6.7 Constrained deconvolution 151
6.8 Estimating an unknown point-spread function or optical transfer
function 154
6.9 Blind deconvolution 156
6.10 Iterative deconvolution and the Lucy–Richardson algorithm 158
6.11 Matrix formulation of image restoration 161
6.12 The standard least-squares solution 162
6.13 Constrained least-squares restoration 163
6.14 Stochastic input distributions and Bayesian estimators 165
6.15 The generalized Gauss–Markov estimator 165

7 Geometry 169
7.1 The description of shape 169
7.2 Shape-preserving transformations 170
7.3 Shape transformation and homogeneous coordinates 171
7.4 The general 2-D affine transformation 173
7.5 Affine transformation in homogeneous coordinates 174
7.6 The Procrustes transformation 175
7.7 Procrustes alignment 176
7.8 The projective transform 180
7.9 Nonlinear transformations 184
7.10 Warping: the spatial transformation of an image 186
7.11 Overdetermined spatial transformations 189
7.12 The piecewise warp 191
7.13 The piecewise affine warp 191
7.14 Warping: forward and reverse mapping 194

8 Morphological processing 197

8.1 Introduction 197
8.2 Binary images: foreground, background and connectedness 197
8.3 Structuring elements and neighbourhoods 198
8.4 Dilation and erosion 200
8.5 Dilation, erosion and structuring elements within Matlab 201
8.6 Structuring element decomposition and Matlab 202
8.7 Effects and uses of erosion and dilation 204
8.7.1 Application of erosion to particle sizing 207
8.8 Morphological opening and closing 209
8.8.1 The rolling-ball analogy 210
8.9 Boundary extraction 212
8.10 Extracting connected components 213
 CONTENTS ix

8.11 Region filling 215

8.12 The hit-or-miss transformation 216
8.12.1 Generalization of hit-or-miss 219
8.13 Relaxing constraints in hit-or-miss: ‘don’t care’ pixels 220
8.13.1 Morphological thinning 222
8.14 Skeletonization 222
8.15 Opening by reconstruction 224
8.16 Grey-scale erosion and dilation 227
8.17 Grey-scale structuring elements: general case 227
8.18 Grey-scale erosion and dilation with flat structuring elements 228
8.19 Grey-scale opening and closing 229
8.20 The top-hat transformation 230
8.21 Summary 231
Exercises 233

9 Features 235
9.1 Landmarks and shape vectors 235
9.2 Single-parameter shape descriptors 237
9.3 Signatures and the radial Fourier expansion 239
9.4 Statistical moments as region descriptors 243
9.5 Texture features based on statistical measures 246
9.6 Principal component analysis 247
9.7 Principal component analysis: an illustrative example 247
9.8 Theory of principal component analysis: version 1 250
9.9 Theory of principal component analysis: version 2 251
9.10 Principal axes and principal components 253
9.11 Summary of properties of principal component analysis 253
9.12 Dimensionality reduction: the purpose of principal
component analysis 256
9.13 Principal components analysis on an ensemble of digital images 257
9.14 Representation of out-of-sample examples using principal
component analysis 257
9.15 Key example: eigenfaces and the human face 259

10 Image Segmentation 263

10.1 Image segmentation 263
10.2 Use of image properties and features in segmentation 263
10.3 Intensity thresholding 265
10.3.1 Problems with global thresholding 266
10.4 Region growing and region splitting 267
10.5 Split-and-merge algorithm 267
10.6 The challenge of edge detection 270
10.7 The Laplacian of Gaussian and difference of Gaussians filters 270
10.8 The Canny edge detector 271
x CONTENTS

10.9 Interest operators 274

10.10 Watershed segmentation 279
10.11 Segmentation functions 280
10.12 Image segmentation with Markov random fields 286
10.12.1 Parameter estimation 288
10.12.2 Neighbourhood weighting parameter un 289
10.12.3 Minimizing U(x | y): the iterated conditional
modes algorithm 290

11 Classification 291
11.1 The purpose of automated classification 291
11.2 Supervised and unsupervised classification 292
11.3 Classification: a simple example 292
11.4 Design of classification systems 294
11.5 Simple classifiers: prototypes and minimum distance
criteria 296
11.6 Linear discriminant functions 297
11.7 Linear discriminant functions in N dimensions 301
11.8 Extension of the minimum distance classifier and the
Mahalanobis distance 302
11.9 Bayesian classification: definitions 303
11.10 The Bayes decision rule 304
11.11 The multivariate normal density 306
11.12 Bayesian classifiers for multivariate normal distributions 307
11.12.1 The Fisher linear discriminant 310
11.12.2 Risk and cost functions 311
11.13 Ensemble classifiers 312
11.13.1 Combining weak classifiers: the AdaBoost method 313
11.14 Unsupervised learning: k-means clustering 313

Further reading 317

Index 319
Preface

Scope of this book

This is an introductory text on the science (and art) of image processing. The book also
employs the Matlab programming language and toolboxes to illuminate and consolidate
some of the elementary but key concepts in modern image processing and pattern
recognition.
The authors are firm believers in the old adage, “Hear and forget. . . , See and remember. . .,
Do and know”. For most of us, it is through good examples and gently guided experimenta-
tion that we really learn. Accordingly, the book has a large number of carefully chosen
examples, graded exercises and computer experiments designed to help the reader get a real
grasp of the material. All the program code (.m files) used in the book, corresponding to the
examples and exercises, are made available to the reader/course instructor and may be
downloaded from the book’s dedicated web site – www.fundipbook.com.

Who is this book for?

For undergraduate and graduate students in the technical disciplines, for technical
professionals seeking a direct introduction to the field of image processing and for
instructors looking to provide a hands-on, structured course. This book intentionally
starts with simple material but we also hope that relative experts will nonetheless find some
interesting and useful material in the latter parts.

Aims
What then are the specific aims of this book ? Two of the principal aims are –

. To introduce the reader to some of the key concepts and techniques of modern image
processing.

. To provide a framework within which these concepts and techniques can be understood
by a series of examples, exercises and computer experiments.
xii PREFACE

These are, perhaps, aims which one might reasonably expect from any book on a technical
subject. However, we have one further aim namely to provide the reader with the fastest,
most direct route to acquiring a real hands-on understanding of image processing. We hope
this book will give you a real fast-start in the field.

Assumptions
We make no assumptions about the reader’s mathematical background beyond that
expected at the undergraduate level in the technical sciences – ie reasonable competence
in calculus, matrix algebra and basic statistics.

Why write this book?

There are already a number of excellent and comprehensive texts on image processing and
pattern recognition and we refer the interested reader to a number in the appendices of this
book. There are also some exhaustive and well-written books on the Matlab language. What
the authors felt was lacking was an image processing book which combines a simple exposition
of principles with a means to quickly test, verify and experiment with them in an instructive and
interactive way.
In our experience, formed over a number of years, Matlab and the associated image
processing toolbox are extremely well-suited to help achieve this aim. It is simple but
powerful and its key feature in this context is that it enables one to concentrate on the image
processing concepts and techniques (i.e. the real business at hand) while keeping concerns
about programming syntax and data management to a minimum.

What is Matlab?
Matlab is a programming language with an associated set of specialist software toolboxes.
It is an industry standard in scientific computing and used worldwide in the scientific,
technical, industrial and educational sectors. Matlab is a commercial product and
information on licences and their cost can be obtained direct by enquiry at the
web-site www.mathworks.com. Many Universities all over the world provide site licenses
for their students.

What knowledge of Matlab is required for this book?

Matlab is very much part of this book and we use it extensively to demonstrate how
certain processing tasks and approaches can be quickly implemented and tried out in
practice. Throughout the book, we offer comments on the Matlab language and the best
way to achieve certain image processing tasks in that language. Thus the learning of
concepts in image processing and their implementation within Matlab go hand-in-hand
in this text.
 PREFACE xiii

Is the book any use then if I don’t know Matlab?

Yes. This is fundamentally a book about image processing which aims to make the subject
accessible and practical. It is not a book about the Matlab programming language. Although
some prior knowledge of Matlab is an advantage and will make the practical implementa-
tion easier, we have endeavoured to maintain a self-contained discussion of the concepts
which will stand up apart from the computer-based material.
If you have not encountered Matlab before and you wish to get the maximum from
this book, please refer to the Matlab and Image Processing primer on the book website
(http://www.fundipbook.com). This aims to give you the essentials on Matlab with a
strong emphasis on the basic properties and manipulation of images.
Thus, you do not have to be knowledgeable in Matlab to profit from this book.

Practical issues
To carry out the vast majority of the examples and exercises in the book, the reader will need
access to a current licence for Matlab and the Image Processing Toolbox only.

Features of this book and future support

This book is accompanied by a dedicated website (http://www.fundipbook.com). The site is
intended to act as a point of contact with the authors, as a repository for the code examples
(Matlab .m files) used in the book and to host additional supporting materials for the reader
and instructor.

About the authors

Chris Solomon gained a B.Sc in theoretical physics from Durham University and a Ph.D in
Medical imaging from the Royal Marsden Hospital, University of London. Since 1994, he
has been on the Faculty at the School of Physical Sciences where he is currently a Reader in
Forensic Imaging. He has broad research interests focussing on evolutionary and genetic
algorithms, image processing and statistical learning methods with a special interest in the
human face. Chris is also Technical Director of Visionmetric Ltd, a company he founded in
1999 and which is now the UK’s leading provider of facial composite software and training
in facial identification to police forces. He has received a number of UK and European
awards for technology innovation and commercialisation of academic research.
Toby Breckon holds a Ph.D in Informatics and B.Sc in Artificial Intelligence and
Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh. Since 2006 he has been a lecturer in
image processing and computer vision in the School of Engineering at Cranfield University.
His key research interests in this domain relate to 3D sensing, real-time vision, sensor
fusion, visual surveillance and robotic deployment. He is additionally a visiting member
of faculty at Ecole Superieure des Technologies Industrielles Avancees (France) and has
held visiting faculty positions in China and Japan. In 2008 he led the development of
xiv PREFACE

image-based automatic threat detection for the winning Stellar Team system in the UK
MoD Grand Challenge. He is a Chartered Engineer (CEng) and an Accredited Imaging
Scientist (AIS) as an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society (ARPS).

Thanks
The authors would like to thank the following people and organisations for their various
support and assistance in the production of this book: the authors families and friends for
their support and (frequent) understanding, Professor Chris Dainty (National University of
Ireland), Dr. Stuart Gibson (University of Kent), Dr. Timothy Lukins (University of
Edinburgh), The University of Kent, Cranfield University, VisionMetric Ltd and Wiley-
Blackwell Publishers.

For further examples and exercises see http://www.fundipbook.com

Using the book website

There is an associated website which forms a vital supplement to this text. It is:
www.fundipbook.com
The material on the site is mostly organised by chapter number and this contains –

EXERCISES: intended to consolidate and highlight concepts discussed in the text. Some of
these exercises are numerical/conceptual, others are based on Matlab.

SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: Proofs, derivations and other supplementary material

referred to in the text are available from this section and are intended to consolidate,
highlight and extend concepts discussed in the text.

Matlab CODE: The Matlab code to all the examples in the book as well as the code used to
create many of the figures are available in the Matlab code section.

IMAGE DATABASE: The Matlab software allows direct access and use to a number of
images as an integral part of the software. Many of these are used in the examples presented
in the text.
We also offer a modest repository of images captured and compiled by the authors which
the reader may freely download and work with. Please note that some of the example Matlab
code contained on the website and presented in the text makes use of these images. You will
therefore need to download these images to run some of the Matlab code shown.

We strongly encourage you to make use of the website and the materials on it. It is a vital
link to making your exploration of the subject both practical and more in-depth. Used
properly, it will help you to get much more from this book.
1
Representation

In this chapter we discuss the representation of images, covering basic notation and
information about images together with a discussion of standard image types and image
formats. We end with a practical section, introducing Matlab’s facilities for reading, writing,
querying, converting and displaying images of different image types and formats.

1.1 What is an image?

A digital image can be considered as a discrete representation of data possessing both spatial
(layout) and intensity (colour) information. As we shall see in Chapter 5, we can also
consider treating an image as a multidimensional signal.

1.1.1 Image layout

The two-dimensional (2-D) discrete, digital image Iðm; nÞ represents the response of some
sensor (or simply a value of some interest) at a series of fixed positions
(m ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; M; n ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; N) in 2-D Cartesian coordinates and is derived from the
2-D continuous spatial signal Iðx; yÞ through a sampling process frequently referred to as
discretization. Discretization occurs naturally with certain types of imaging sensor (such as
CCD cameras) and basically effects a local averaging of the continuous signal over some
small (typically square) region in the receiving domain.
The indices m and n respectively designate the rows and columns of the image. The
individual picture elements or pixels of the image are thus referred to by their 2-D ðm; nÞ
index. Following the Matlab
convention, Iðm; nÞ denotes the response of the pixel
located at the mth row and nth column starting from a top-left image origin (see
Figure 1.1). In other imaging systems, a column–row convention may be used and the
image origin in use may also vary.
Although the images we consider in this book will be discrete, it is often theoretically
convenient to treat an image as a continuous spatial signal: Iðx; yÞ. In particular, this
sometimes allows us to make more natural use of the powerful techniques of integral and
differential calculus to understand properties of images and to effectively manipulate and

Fundamentals of Digital Image Processing – A Practical Approach with Examples in Matlab

Chris Solomon and Toby Breckon
 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
2 CH 1 REPRESENTATION

Figure 1.1 The 2-D Cartesian coordinate space of an M x N digital image

process them. Mathematical analysis of discrete images generally leads to a linear algebraic
formulation which is better in some instances.
The individual pixel values in most images do actually correspond to some physical
response in real 2-D space (e.g. the optical intensity received at the image plane of a camera
or the ultrasound intensity at a transceiver). However, we are also free to consider images in
abstract spaces where the coordinates correspond to something other than physical space
and we may also extend the notion of an image to three or more dimensions. For example,
medical imaging applications sometimes consider full three-dimensional (3-D) recon-
struction of internal organs and a time sequence of such images (such as a beating heart) can
be treated (if we wish) as a single four-dimensional (4-D) image in which three coordinates
are spatial and the other corresponds to time. When we consider 3-D imaging we are often
discussing spatial volumes represented by the image. In this instance, such 3-D pixels are
denoted as voxels (volumetric pixels) representing the smallest spatial location in the 3-D
volume as opposed to the conventional 2-D image.
Throughout this book we will usually consider 2-D digital images, but much of our
discussion will be relevant to images in higher dimensions.

1.1.2 Image colour

An image contains one or more colour channels that define the intensity or colour at a
particular pixel location Iðm; nÞ.
In the simplest case, each pixel location only contains a single numerical value
representing the signal level at that point in the image. The conversion from this set of
numbers to an actual (displayed) image is achieved through a colour map. A colour map
assigns a specific shade of colour to each numerical level in the image to give a visual
representation of the data. The most common colour map is the greyscale, which assigns
all shades of grey from black (zero) to white (maximum) according to the signal level. The
 1.2 RESOLUTION AND QUANTIZATION 3

Figure 1.2 Example of grayscale (left) and false colour (right) image display (See colour plate section
for colour version)

greyscale is particularly well suited to intensity images, namely images which express only
the intensity of the signal as a single value at each point in the region.
In certain instances, it can be better to display intensity images using a false-colour map.
One of the main motives behind the use of false-colour display rests on the fact that the
human visual system is only sensitive to approximately 40 shades of grey in the range from
black to white, whereas our sensitivity to colour is much finer. False colour can also serve to
accentuate or delineate certain features or structures, making them easier to identify for the
human observer. This approach is often taken in medical and astronomical images.
Figure 1.2 shows an astronomical intensity image displayed using both greyscale and a
particular false-colour map. In this example the jet colour map (as defined in Matlab) has
been used to highlight the structure and finer detail of the image to the human viewer using a
linear colour scale ranging from dark blue (low intensity values) to dark red (high intensity
values). The definition of colour maps, i.e. assigning colours to numerical values, can be
done in any way which the user finds meaningful or useful. Although the mapping between
the numerical intensity value and the colour or greyscale shade is typically linear, there are
situations in which a nonlinear mapping between them is more appropriate. Such nonlinear
mappings are discussed in Chapter 4.
In addition to greyscale images where we have a single numerical value at each
pixel location, we also have true colour images where the full spectrum of colours can
be represented as a triplet vector, typically the (R,G,B) components at each pixel
location. Here, the colour is represented as a linear combination of the basis colours or
values and the image may be considered as consisting of three 2-D planes. Other
representations of colour are also possible and used quite widely, such as the (H,S,V)
(hue, saturation and value (or intensity)). In this representation, the intensity V of the
colour is decoupled from the chromatic information, which is contained within the H
and S components (see Section 1.4.2).

1.2 Resolution and quantization

The size of the 2-D pixel grid together with the data size stored for each individual image
pixel determines the spatial resolution and colour quantization of the image.
4 CH 1 REPRESENTATION

The representational power (or size) of an image is defined by its resolution. The
resolution of an image source (e.g. a camera) can be specified in terms of three quantities:

. Spatial resolution The column (C) by row (R) dimensions of the image define the
number of pixels used to cover the visual space captured by the image. This relates to the
sampling of the image signal and is sometimes referred to as the pixel or digital
resolution of the image. It is commonly quoted as C  R (e.g. 640  480, 800  600,
1024  768, etc.)

. Temporal resolution For a continuous capture system such as video, this is the number of
images captured in a given time period. It is commonly quoted in frames per second
(fps), where each individual image is referred to as a video frame (e.g. commonly
broadcast TV operates at 25 fps; 25–30 fps is suitable for most visual surveillance; higher
frame-rate cameras are available for specialist science/engineering capture).

. Bit resolution This defines the number of possible intensity/colour values that a pixel
may have and relates to the quantization of the image information. For instance a binary
image has just two colours (black or white), a grey-scale image commonly has 256
different grey levels ranging from black to white whilst for a colour image it depends on
the colour range in use. The bit resolution is commonly quoted as the number of binary
bits required for storage at a given quantization level, e.g. binary is 2 bit, grey-scale is 8 bit
and colour (most commonly) is 24 bit. The range of values a pixel may take is often
referred to as the dynamic range of an image.

It is important to recognize that the bit resolution of an image does not necessarily
correspond to the resolution of the originating imaging system. A common feature of many
cameras is automatic gain, in which the minimum and maximum responses over the image
field are sensed and this range is automatically divided into a convenient number of bits (i.e.
digitized into N levels). In such a case, the bit resolution of the image is typically less than
that which is, in principle, achievable by the device.
By contrast, the blind, unadjusted conversion of an analog signal into a given number of
bits, for instance 216 ¼ 65 536 discrete levels, does not, of course, imply that the true
resolution of the imaging device as a whole is actually 16 bits. This is because the overall level
of noise (i.e. random fluctuation) in the sensor and in the subsequent processing chain may
be of a magnitude which easily exceeds a single digital level. The sensitivity of an imaging
system is thus fundamentally determined by the noise, and this makes noise a key factor in
determining the number of quantization levels used for digitization. There is no point in
digitizing an image to a high number of bits if the level of noise present in the image sensor
does not warrant it.

1.2.1 Bit-plane splicing

The visual significance of individual pixel bits in an image can be assessed in a subjective but
useful manner by the technique of bit-plane splicing.
To illustrate the concept, imagine an 8-bit image which allows integer values from 0 to
255. This can be conceptually divided into eight separate image planes, each corresponding
 1.3 IMAGE FORMATS 5

Figure 1.3 An example of bit-plane slicing a grey-scale image

to the values of a given bit across all of the image pixels. The first bit plane comprises the first
and most significant bit of information (intensity ¼ 128), the second, the second most
significant bit (intensity ¼ 64) and so on. Displaying each of the bit planes in succession, we
may discern whether there is any visible structure in them.
In Figure 1.3, we show the bit planes of an 8-bit grey-scale image of a car tyre descending
from the most significant bit to the least significant bit. It is apparent that the two or three
least significant bits do not encode much useful visual information (it is, in fact, mostly
noise). The sequence of images on the right in Figure 1.3 shows the effect on the original
image of successively setting the bit planes to zero (from the first and most significant to the
least significant). In a similar fashion, we see that these last bits do not appear to encode any
visible structure. In this specific case, therefore, we may expect that retaining only the five
most significant bits will produce an image which is practically visually identical to the
original. Such analysis could lead us to a more efficient method of encoding the image using
fewer bits – a method of image compression. We will discuss this next as part of our
examination of image storage formats.

1.3 Image formats

From a mathematical viewpoint, any meaningful 2-D array of numbers can be considered
as an image. In the real world, we need to effectively display images, store them (preferably
6 CH 1 REPRESENTATION

Table 1.1 Common image formats and their associated properties

Acronym Name Properties
GIF Graphics interchange format Limited to only 256 colours (8-bit); lossless
compression
JPEG Joint Photographic Experts Group In most common use today; lossy
compression; lossless variants exist
BMP Bit map picture Basic image format; limited (generally)
lossless compression; lossy variants exist
PNG Portable network graphics New lossless compression format; designed
to replace GIF
TIF/TIFF Tagged image (file) format Highly flexible, detailed and adaptable
format; compressed/uncompressed variants
exist

compactly), transmit them over networks and recognize bodies of numerical data as
corresponding to images. This has led to the development of standard digital image
formats. In simple terms, the image formats comprise a file header (containing informa-
tion on how exactly the image data is stored) and the actual numeric pixel values
themselves. There are a large number of recognized image formats now existing, dating
back over more than 30 years of digital image storage. Some of the most common 2-D
image formats are listed in Table 1.1. The concepts of lossy and lossless compression are
detailed in Section 1.3.2.
As suggested by the properties listed in Table 1.1, different image formats are generally
suitable for different applications. GIF images are a very basic image storage format limited
to only 256 grey levels or colours, with the latter defined via a colour map in the file header as
discussed previously. By contrast, the commonplace JPEG format is capable of storing up to
a 24-bit RGB colour image, and up to 36 bits for medical/scientific imaging applications,
and is most widely used for consumer-level imaging such as digital cameras. Other common
formats encountered include the basic bitmap format (BMP), originating in the develop-
ment of the Microsoft Windows operating system, and the new PNG format, designed as a
more powerful replacement for GIF. TIFF, tagged image file format, represents an
overarching and adaptable file format capable of storing a wide range of different image
data forms. In general, photographic-type images are better suited towards JPEG or TIF
storage, whilst images of limited colour/detail (e.g. logos, line drawings, text) are best suited
to GIF or PNG (as per TIFF), as a lossless, full-colour format, is adaptable to the majority of
image storage requirements.

1.3.1 Image data types

The choice of image format used can be largely determined by not just the image contents,
but also the actual image data type that is required for storage. In addition to the bit
resolution of a given image discussed earlier, a number of distinct image types also exist:

. Binary images are 2-D arrays that assign one numerical value from the set f0; 1g to each
pixel in the image. These are sometimes referred to as logical images: black corresponds
 1.3 IMAGE FORMATS 7

to zero (an ‘off’ or ‘background’ pixel) and white corresponds to one (an ‘on’ or
‘foreground’ pixel). As no other values are permissible, these images can be represented
as a simple bit-stream, but in practice they are represented as 8-bit integer images in the
common image formats. A fax (or facsimile) image is an example of a binary image.

. Intensity or grey-scale images are 2-D arrays that assign one numerical value to each
pixel which is representative of the intensity at this point. As discussed previously, the
pixel value range is bounded by the bit resolution of the image and such images are
stored as N-bit integer images with a given format.

. RGB or true-colour images are 3-D arrays that assign three numerical values to each
pixel, each value corresponding to the red, green and blue (RGB) image channel
component respectively. Conceptually, we may consider them as three distinct, 2-D
planes so that they are of dimension C by R by 3, where R is the number of image rows
and C the number of image columns. Commonly, such images are stored as sequential
integers in successive channel order (e.g. R0G0B0, R1G1B1, . . .) which are then accessed
(as in Matlab) by IðC; R; channelÞ coordinates within the 3-D array. Other colour
representations which we will discuss later are similarly stored using the 3-D array
concept, which can also be extended (starting numerically from 1 with Matlab arrays) to
four or more dimensions to accommodate additional image information, such as an
alpha (transparency) channel (as in the case of PNG format images).

. Floating-point images differ from the other image types we have discussed. By defini-
tion, they do not store integer colour values. Instead, they store a floating-point number
which, within a given range defined by the floating-point precision of the image bit-
resolution, represents the intensity. They may (commonly) represent a measurement
value other than simple intensity or colour as part of a scientific or medical image.
Floating point images are commonly stored in the TIFF image format or a more
specialized, domain-specific format (e.g. medical DICOM). Although the use of
floating-point images is increasing through the use of high dynamic range and stereo
photography, file formats supporting their storage currently remain limited.

Figure 1.4 shows an example of the different image data types we discuss with an example
of a suitable image format used for storage. Although the majority of images we will
encounter in this text will be of integer data types, Matlab, as a general matrix-based data
analysis tool, can of course be used to process floating-point image data.

1.3.2 Image compression

The other main consideration in choosing an image storage format is compression. Whilst
compressing an image can mean it takes up less disk storage and can be transferred over a
network in less time, several compression techniques in use exploit what is known as lossy
compression. Lossy compression operates by removing redundant information from the image.
As the example of bit-plane slicing in Section 1.2.1 (Figure 1.3) shows, it is possible to
remove some information from an image without any apparent change in its visual
 Another Random Document on
Scribd Without Any Related Topics
Continent with their infant daughters in 1821, and the question
became urgent, Where to live? The landed property which he
inherited from his great-uncle was a comparatively small estate at
and around Lea Hall in Derbyshire. To this property he added largely.
The Hall, the old residence of his great-uncle, was discarded (it is
now used as a farm-house), and Mr. Nightingale built a new house,
called Lea Hurst. The charm of its situation and prospect is described
in a letter by Mrs. Gaskell:—

“High as Lea Hurst is, one seems on a pinnacle, with the clouds
careering round one. Down below is a garden with stone terraces and
flights of steps—the planes of these terraces being perfectly gorgeous
with masses of hollyhocks, dahlias, nasturtiums, geraniums, etc. Then a
sloping meadow losing itself in a steep wooded descent (such tints over
the wood!) to the river Derwent, the rocks on the other side of which form
the first distance, and are of a red colour streaked with misty purple.
Beyond this, interlacing hills, forming three ranges of distance; the first,
deep brown with decaying heather; the next, in some purple shadow, and
the last catching some pale, watery sunlight.” “I am left alone,” continued
Mrs. Gaskell, “established high up, in two rooms, opening one out of the
other—the old nurseries.” (The inner one, in which Mrs. Gaskell slept, was,
when Parthenope grew up, her bedroom.) “It is curious how simple it is.
The old carpet doesn't cover the floor. No easy chair, no sofa, a little
curtainless bed, a small glass. In the outer room—the former day nursery
—Miss Florence's room when she is at home, everything is equally simple;
now, of course, the bed is reconverted into a sofa; two small tables, a few
bookshelves, a drab carpet only partially covering the clean boards, and
stone-coloured walls—as cold in colouring as need be, but with one low
window on one side, trellised over with Virginian creeper as gorgeous as
can be; and the opposite one, by which I am writing, looking over such
country!”[6]

The sound of the Derwent was often in Florence's ears. When she
was in the Hospital at Scutari any fretting in the Straits recalled it to
her. “How I like,” she said on a stormy night, “to hear that ceaseless
roar; it puts me in mind of the dear Derwent; how often I have
listened to it from the nursery window.”

Lea Hurst became one of Florence Nightingale's earliest homes in

England, but it was not the earliest of all. The house was not built
when the family returned from the Continent, and Mr. Nightingale
took Kynsham Court, Presteigne, in Herefordshire. The place, it
seems, was “more picturesque than habitable,” and negotiations for
the purchase of it, with a view to improvements, fell through.
Mr. Nightingale liked Derbyshire, and was fond of his new house; but
the rich, as well as the poor, have their perplexities. “The difficulty
is,” wrote Mr. Nightingale to his wife, “where is the county that is
habitable for twelve successive months?” And, again, “How would
you like Leicestershire? For my part, I think that, provided I could
get about 2000 acres and a house in some neighbouring county
where sporting and scenery were in tolerable abundance, and the
visit to Lea Hurst were annually confined to July, August, September,
and October, then all would be well.” While Mrs. Nightingale stayed
at Kynsham, or took the children for change of air to the seaside or
Tunbridge Wells, Mr. Nightingale divided his time between the
management of his property in Derbyshire and the search for a
second home elsewhere. Ultimately he found what he wanted at
Embley Park in the parish of Wellow, near Romsey. This estate was
bought in 1825, and Kynsham was given up. Embley is on the edge
of the New Forest, and the rich growth of its woods and gardens is
much favoured by sun and moisture. Old oaks and beeches, thickets
of flowering laurel and rhododendron, and a profusion of flowers and
scents, contrast with the bare breezy hills of Derbyshire. Its new
owners had here the variety they wished for, and a full scope for
their taste. The most praised of its beauties is a long road almost
shut in by masses of rhododendron. One of the occasional pleasures
of Miss Nightingale's later life in London was a drive in the Park, in
rhododendron-time, “to remind her of Embley.”

III

From her fifth year onwards Florence Nightingale had, then, for
her homes Lea Hurst in the summer months and Embley during the
rest of the year. The family usually spent a portion of the season in
London. The sisters led, it will thus be seen, a life mainly in the
country, and Florence as a child became fond of flowers, birds, and
beasts. A neatly printed manuscript-book is preserved, in which she
made a catalogue of her collection of flowers, describing each with
analytical accuracy, and noting the particular spot at which it was
picked. Her childish letters contain many references to animal
companions. She made particular friends with the nuthatch. She had
a pet pig, a pet donkey, a pet pony. She was fond of riding, and fond
of dogs. “A small pet animal,” she said many years afterwards, “is
often an excellent companion for the sick, for long chronic cases
especially.” “The more I see of men,” wrote a cynic, “the more I love
dogs.” Florence Nightingale, in the same piece from which I have
just quoted, drew a like moral from her experience of some nurses.
“An invalid,” she said, “in giving an account of his nursing by a nurse
and a dog, infinitely preferred that of the dog. ‘Above all,’ he said, ‘it
did not talk.’”[7] There were no babies in the Nightingale family after
the arrival of Florence herself, but most of her mother's many
brothers and sisters married and had families; and as Mr. and
Mrs. Nightingale's houses were often visited by these relations, there
was seldom wanting a succession of babies, and in them and their
christenings, and teethings, and illnesses, and lessons, Florence took
that interest which is often strong in little girls.
 Sometimes a baby died, and her letters show that Florence was as
much interested in a death as in a birth. She rejoiced in “the little
angels in heaven.” One of her favourite poems at this period was
The Better Land of Mrs. Hemans, which she copied out for a cousin
as “so very beautiful.” The earliest letter which I have seen, written
when she was ten, strikes mingled notes. She is staying with Uncle
Octavius Smith at “Thames Bank” (a house which then adjoined his
distillery at Millbank), and writes to her sister, who is on a visit with
the maid to another set of cousins:—

Give my love to Clémence, and tell her, if you please, that I am not in
the room where she established me, but in a very small one; instead of
the beautiful view of the Thames, a most dismal one of the black distillery,
and, whenever I open my window, the nasty smell rushes in like a torrent.
But I like it pretty well notwithstanding. There is a hole through the
wall[11] close to my door, which communicates with the bath-room, which
is next the room where Freddy[8] sleeps, and he talks to me by there. Tell
her also, if you please, that I have washed myself all over and feet in
warm water since I came every night. I went up into the distillery to the
very tip-top by ladders with Uncle Oc and Fred Saturday night. We walked
along a great pipe. We have had a good deal of boating which I like very
much. We see three steam-boats pass every day, the Diana, the Fly, and
the Endeavour. My love to all of them except Miss W——. Give my love
particularly to Hilary. Your affect and only sister. Dear Pop, I think of you,
pray let us love one another more than we have done. Mama wishes it
particularly, it is the will of God, and it will comfort us in our trials through
life. Good-bye.

Was Miss W—— an unsympathetic governess? Whoever she was,

the exception in her disfavour shows an unregenerate impulse which
contrasts naïvely with the following good resolve towards her sister.
To a year earlier belongs a little note-book, entitled “Journal of Flo,
Embley.” It begins with the reminder, “The Lord is with thee
wherever thou art.” And then an entry records, “Sunday, I obliged to
sit still by Miss Christie till I had the spirit of obedience.” As a child,
and throughout all the earlier part of her life, Florence was much
given to dreaming, and in some introspective speculations written in
1851 she recalled the pleasures of naughtiness. “When I was a child
and was naughty, it always put an end to my dreaming for the time.
I never could tell why. Was it because naughtiness was a more
interesting state than the little motives which make man's peaceful
civilized state, and occupied imagination for the time?” To Miss
Christie, her first governess, Florence became greatly attached, and
the death of the lady a few years later threw her into deep grief. She
was a sensitive, and a somewhat morbid child; and though she
presently developed a lively sense of humour, to which she had the
capacity of giving trenchant expression, it was the humour of
intellect rather than the outcome of a joyous disposition. Her early
letters contain little note of childish fun. They are for the most part
grave and introspective. She was self-absorbed, and had the shyness
which attends upon that habit. “My greatest ambition,” she wrote in
some private reminiscences of her early life, “was not to be
remarked. I was always in mortal fear of doing something unlike
other people, and I said, ‘If I were sure that nobody would remark
me I should be quite happy.’ I had a morbid terror of not using my
knives and forks like other people when I should come out. I was
afraid of speaking to children because I was sure I should not please
them.” Meanwhile, she was perhaps at times, even as a child, a little
“difficult” at home. “Ask Flo,” wrote her father to his wife in 1832, “if
she has lost her intellect. If not, why does she grumble at troubles
which she cannot remedy by grumbling?”

IV
 The appeal to his daughter's intellect was characteristic of
Mr. Nightingale. He was himself a well-informed man, educated at
Edinburgh, and Trinity, Cambridge; and, like some others of the
Unitarian circle, he held views much in advance of the average
opinion of his time about the intellectual education of women. The
home education of his daughters was largely supervised by himself;
it included a range of subjects far outside the curriculum current in
“young ladies' seminaries”; and perhaps, like Hannah More's father,
he was sometimes “frightened at his own success.” Letters and note-
books show, it is true, that his daughters were duly instructed in the
accomplishments deemed appropriate to young ladies. We hear of
them learning the use of the globes, writing books of elegant
extracts, working footstools, and doing fancy work. They studied
music, grammar, composition, modern languages. “We used to read
Tasso and Ariosto and Alfieri with my father,” Florence said; “he was
a good and always interested Italian scholar, never pedantic, never a
tiresome grammarian, but he spoke Italian like an Italian and I took
care of the verbs.” Mr. Nightingale added constitutional history, Latin,
Greek, and mathematics. By the time Florence was sixteen, he was
reading Homer with his daughters. Miss Nightingale used to say that
at Greek her sister was the quicker scholar. Their father set them
appointed tasks to prepare. Parthenope would trust largely to
improvisation or lucky shots. Florence was more laborious; and
sometimes would get up at four in the morning to prepare the
lesson. Her knowledge of Latin was of some practical use in later
years. In conversations with abbots and monks whom she met
during her travels she sometimes found in Latin their only common
tongue. Among Florence's papers were preserved many sheets in
her father's handwriting, containing the heads of admirable outlines
of the political history of England and of some foreign states. Her
own note-books show that in her teens she had mastered the
elements of Latin and Greek. She analysed the Tusculan
Disputations. She translated portions of the Phaedo, the Crito and
the Apology. She had studied Roman, German, Italian, and Turkish
history. She had analysed Dugald Stewart's Philosophy of the Human
Mind. Her father was in the habit, too, of suggesting themes on
which his daughters were to write compositions. It was the system
of the College Essay. “Florence has now taken to mathematics,”
wrote her sister in 1840, “and, like everything she undertakes, she is
deep in them and working very hard.” The direction in which
Florence Nightingale was to exercise the faculties thus trained was
as yet hidden in the future; but to her father's guidance she was
indebted for the mental grasp and power of intellectual
concentration which were to distinguish her work in life.

It is a natural temptation of biographers to give a formal unity to

their subject by representing the child as in all things the father of
the man; to date the vocation of their hero or heroine very early in
life; to magnify some childish incident as prophetic of what is to
come thereafter. Material is available for such treatment in the case
of Florence Nightingale. It has been recorded that she used to nurse
and bandage the dolls which her elder sister damaged. Every book
about the heroine of the Crimea contains, too, a tale of “first aid to
the wounded” which Florence administered to Cap, the shepherd's
collie, whom she found with a broken leg on the downs near Embley.
“I wonder,” wrote her “old Pastor”[9] to her in 1858, “whether you
remember how, twenty-two years ago, you and I together averted
the intended hanging of poor old Shepherd Smithers's dog, Cap.
How many times I have told the story since! I well recollect the
pleasure which the saving of the life of a poor dog then gave to your
young mind. I was delighted to witness it; it was to me not indeed
an omen of what you were about to do and be (for of that I never
dreamed), but it was an index of that kind and benevolent
disposition, of that I Cor. xiii. Charity, which has been at the root of
it.” And it is certainly interesting and curious, if nothing more, that
the very earliest piece in the handwriting of Florence Nightingale
which has been preserved should be a medical prescription. It is
contained in a tiny book, about the size of a postage-stamp, which
the little girl stitched together and in which the instruction is written,
in very childish letters, “16 grains for an old woman, 11 for a young
woman, and 7 for a child.” But these things are after all but trifles.
Florence Nightingale is not the only little girl who has been fond of
nursing sick dolls or mending them when broken. Other children
have tended wounded animals and had their pill-boxes and simples.
Much, too, has been written about Florence's kindness as a child to
her poorer neighbours. Her mother, both at Lea Hurst and at Embley,
sometimes occupied herself in good works. She and her husband
were particularly interested in a “cheap school” which they
supported at their Derbyshire home. “Large sums of money have
been paid,” wrote Mr. Nightingale to his wife in 1832, “to your
schoolmistress for many praiseworthy purposes, who works con
amore in looking after the whole population, young and old.”
Florence took her place, beside her mother, in visiting poor
neighbours, in arranging school-treats, in giving village
entertainments. But thousands of other squires' daughters, before
and after her, have done the like. And Florence herself, as many
entries in her diaries show, was not conscious of doing much, but
reproachful of herself for doing little. The constant burden of her
self-examination, both at this time and for many years to come, was
that she was for ever “dreaming” and never “doing.” She was
dreaming because for a long time she did not clearly feel or see
what her work in life was to be; and then for yet another period of
time because, when she knew what she was called to do, she could
not compass the means to do it. Her faculties were not brought
outwards, but were left, by the conditions of her life, to devour
themselves inwardly.

The discovery of her true vocation belongs, then, to a later period

of our story; and it was not the result of childish fancy, or the
accomplishment of early incident; it was the fruit of long and earnest
study. What did come to Florence Nightingale early in life—perhaps,
as one entry in her autobiographical notes suggests, as early as her
sixth year—was the sense of a “call”; of some appointed mission in
life; of self-dedication to the service of God. “I remember her,” wrote
Fanny Allen in 1857 to her niece Elizabeth Wedgwood, “as a little girl
of three or four, then the girl of sixteen of high promise. When I look
back on every time I saw her after her sixteenth year, I see that she
was ripening constantly for her work, and that her mind was
dwelling on the painful differences of man and man in this life, and
on the traps that a luxurious life laid for the affluent. A conversation
on this subject between the father and daughter made me laugh at
the time, the contrast was so striking; but now, as I remember it, it
was the Divine Spirit breathing in her.”[10] In an autobiographical
fragment written in 1867 Florence mentions as one of the crises of
her inner life that “God called her to His service” on February 7,
1837, at Embley; and there are later notes which still fix that day as
the dawn of her true life. But as yet she knew not whither the Spirit
was to lead. For three months, indeed, as she notes in another
passage of retrospect, she “worked very hard among the poor
people” under “a strong feeling of religion.”
 V

Presently, however, a new direction was given to her thoughts and

interests. She was now seventeen, her sister eighteen. Their home
education had been far advanced, and might seem to require only
such “finishing” as masters and society in France and Italy could
supply. Mr. Nightingale had, moreover, decided to carry out extensive
alterations at Embley. With his wife and daughters, he crossed from
Southampton to Havre on September 8, 1837, and they did not
return to England till April 6, 1839. Those were days of leisurely
travel, such as Ruskin describes, in which “distance could not be
vanquished without toil, but in which that toil was rewarded, partly
by the power of deliberate survey of the countries through which the
journey lay, and partly by the happiness of the evening hours, when
from the top of the last hill he had surmounted, the traveller beheld
the quiet village where he was to rest, scattered among the
meadows beside its valley stream; or, from the long-hoped-for turn
in the dusty perspective of the causeway, saw, for the first time, the
towers of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset—hours of
peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in
the railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an
equivalent.” There were many such hours during the journeys which
the Nightingales took with a vetturino through France and Italy; and
Florence, writing at a later date, when all her life was fixed on doing,
noted that on this tour there was “too much time for dreaming.” Yet
it is clear from her diaries that she entered heartily, and with a wider
range of interest than some English travellers show, into the life of
foreign society and sight-seeing. A love of statistical method which
became one of her most marked characteristics may already be seen
in an itinerary which she compiled; noting, in its several columns,
the number of leagues from place to place, with the day and the
hour both of arrival and of departure. They went leisurely through
France, visiting, besides many other places, Chartres, Blois, Tours,
Nantes, Bordeaux, Biarritz, Carcassonne, Nîmes, Avignon, and
Toulon, and then going by the Riviera to Nice. There they stayed for
nearly a month (Dec. 1837–Jan. 1838). A month was next spent at
Genoa, and two months were given to Florence. The late spring and
summer were devoted to travel in the cities of Northern Italy, among
the lakes, and in Switzerland. They spent the month of September in
Geneva, and reached Paris on October 8, 1838. Miss Nightingale
preserved her diary of the greater part of the tour, and it shows her
keenly interested alike in scenery and in works of art. It contains
also, what records of sentimental pilgrimages often lack, an
admixture of notes and statistics upon the laws, the land systems,
the social conditions and benevolent institutions of the several states
or cantons. Her interest in the politics of the day was keen wherever
she was; and the society of many refugees into which she was
thrown at Geneva gave her a particularly ardent sympathy with the
cause of Italian freedom. The diary contains many biographical notes
upon Italian patriots, whose adventures she heard related by their
own lips. “A stirring day,” she wrote on September 12 (1838), “the
most stirring which we have ever lived.” It was the day on which the
news reached Geneva that the Emperor of Austria had declared an
amnesty in Italy. The Nightingales attended an evening party at
which the Italian refugees assembled and the Imperial decree was
read out amidst loud jubilation; which, however, was afterwards
abated when it turned out that the “general amnesty” contained
many conditions and some exceptions. The Nightingales had the
entrée to all the learned society of Geneva. Florence records an
evening spent with M. de Candolle, the famous botanist; and the
diary gives many glimpses of Sismondi, the historian, who was then
living in his native city. He escorted the Nightingale party up the
Salève. They made that not very formidable ascent first on donkeys
and then “in a sledge covered with straw and drawn by four oxen.”
Florence was present on another occasion when “all the company
gathered round Sismondi who, sitting on a table, gave us a lecture
on Florentine history.” The conscientious Florence made a full note in
her diary of the great man's discourse. “All Sismondi's political
economy,” she also noted, “seems to be founded on the overflowing
kindness of his heart. He gives to old beggars on principle, to young
from habit. At Pescia he had 300 beggars at his door on one
morning. He feeds the mice in his room while he is writing his
histories.” Presently there was a new excitement in Geneva. “What a
stirring time we live in,” Florence wrote on September 18; “one day
to decide the fate of the Italians, to-morrow to decide the fate of
Switzerland.” “To-morrow” was the day fixed for the meeting of the
Conseil Représentatif which was to take into consideration the
demand of Louis Philippe for the expulsion of Louis Napoleon, the
future Emperor. Many pages of Miss Nightingale's diary are given up
to this affair. She analysed all the pros and cons, and recorded day
by day the course of the debate. Sismondi thought that the refugee
ought to be surrendered—on principle because he was a pretender,
in expediency because Geneva would be unable to withstand a
French assault. He “spoke for an hour” in this sense. The Genevois
radicals, on the other hand, while entertaining no great love for the
pretender, thought that, cost what it might, “the sacred right of
asylum” should be maintained. And so the debate continued. The
French Government began to move troops from Lyons; the
Genevois, to throw up fortifications. Whereupon Mr. Nightingale, like
many other English visitors, thought it time to take his family across
the frontier. Miss Nightingale's diary written en route to Paris shows
her excitement to obtain news of the crisis. When she learnt that it
had been solved by Louis Napoleon being given a passport for
England, she did not see that Louis Philippe had gained very much;
the pretender would be nearer, and not less dangerous, in London
than in Geneva—a very just prediction. Not every girl of eighteen,
when taking her first tour abroad, shows so lively an interest in
political affairs.

Politics and social observations mingle in the diary with artistic and
architectural notes. The city which seems most to have appealed to
her imagination was not Florence; though she said that she “would
not have missed it for anything,” and, curiously, her sojourn in her
birthplace was the occasion of a characteristic incident. An English
lady, who afterwards became Princess Reuss Köstritz, was staying in
the same lodgings and fell ill, and Florence Nightingale volunteered
to nurse her. But the city which she most admired was Genoa La
Superba. She notes indeed the excessive indolence of the nobles
and excessive poverty of the people, but the palaces “realized an
Arabian Nights story” for her. Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale had many
friends and brought many introductions. In the various towns where
they stayed they mixed in the best society, and their daughters were
thrown into a lively round of picnics, concerts, soirées, dancing:

Balls and masks begun at midnight, burning ever to mid-day,

When they made up fresh adventures for the morrow—

There were Court balls at which Grand Dukes were “exceedingly

polite” to Florence Nightingale and her sister. They went to an
evening Court at Florence, and found “everyone most courteous and
agreeable.” There was a ball at the Casino in Genoa, at which, writes
Florence in her diary, “my partner and I made an embrouillement,
and a military officer came up with a very angry face to challenge
me for having refused him and then not dancing.” But the music was
not all to the tune of “A Toccata of Galuppi's.” What gave Florence
the greatest pleasure on this tour was the Italian opera. In those
days the reigning singers were Grisi, Lablache, Rubini, and
Tamburini. Florence Nightingale heard them all. Her Italian diary is
nowhere so elaborate as in descriptions of the operas and in notes
on the performers. She kept a separate book in which she wrote
tabulated details of all the performances. “I should like to go every
night,” she said in her diary; and for some time after her return from
the Continent she was, as she wrote to Miss Clarke, “music-mad.”
She took music-lessons at Florence, and in London studied under
German and Italian masters. She played and sang. It was as yet
uncertain whether “the call”—to what, as yet also unknown—might
not be drowned in the tastes, interests, and pursuits which fill the
life of other young ladies in her position.

VI

The fascination of social life must have been brought vividly before
her during the winter (1838–39) which they spent in Paris, in
apartments in the Place Vendôme (No. 22). She was now introduced
into the brilliant circle of the last of the salons. Mary Clarke,
afterwards Madame Mohl, was by descent half Irish, half Scottish; by
education and residence, almost wholly French. “A charming
mixture,” said Ampère of her, “of French vivacity and English
originality.” Full at once of esprit and of espièglerie, well read and
artistic yet wholly devoid of pedantry, without regular beauty of
feature, but alert and piquante, Mary Clarke had gathered round her
what Ticknor in 1837 had found the most intellectual circle in Paris.
For seven years she and her mother lived in apartments in the
Abbaye-au-Bois, adjoining those of Madame Récamier, and Mary was
a daily visitor to the famous salon during the reign of Chateaubriand,
whose closing years she did much to brighten and amuse. At the
time when the Nightingales arrived in Paris, Mrs. and Miss Clarke
had left the Abbaye-au-Bois and established themselves in those
apartments in the Rue du Bac which for nearly forty years were a
haunt of all that was brilliant in the intellectual life of Paris. Mary
Clarke took most affectionately to the Nightingale family, who, with
some of their connections, remained for long years among her
closest friends. She used to pay a yearly visit to Mr. and
Mrs. Nightingale, either at Embley or at Lea Hurst, generally staying
three weeks or a month; and to her many of Florence's most
interesting letters were, as we shall find, addressed. To her other
and more superficial qualities, Mary Clarke added great warmth of
lasting affection for her intimate friends, and her sympathetic
kindness to the Nightingale circle was unfailing. The attraction of
Paris to Florence lay principally in its hospitals and nursing
sisterhoods, but partly also in that it was the home of “Clarkey,” as
they called her. And it was the same with other members of the
family. There is a letter from Lady Verney to Clarkey which describes
how some one asked Mr. Nightingale, “Are you going to Paris?” “Oh,
no,” he replied; “Madame Mohl is ill.” “Then does Paris mean
Madame Mohl?” “Yes, certainly,” he replied gravely. During the winter
of 1838–39 Miss Clarke, writes Lady Verney, was “exceedingly kind
to Florence and me, two young girls full of all kinds of interests,
which she took the greatest pains to help. She made us acquainted
with all her friends, many and notable, among them Madame
Récamier. I know now, better than then, what her influence must
have been thus to introduce an English family (two of them girls
who, if French, would not have appeared in society) into that
jealously guarded sanctuary, the most exclusive aristocratic and
literary salon in Paris. We were asked, even, to the reading by
Chateaubriand, at the Abbaye-au-Bois, of his Mémoires d'Outre-
Tombe, which he could not wait to put forth, as he had intended
when writing them, until after his death—desiring, it was said, to
discount the praises which he expected, but hardly received. This
hearing was a favour eagerly sought for by the cream of the cream
of Paris society at that time.”[11] In Miss Clarke's own apartments,
the Nightingales met many distinguished men. The intimates who
were always there, and who assisted their hostess in making the tea,
were MM. Fauriel and Mohl—Claude Fauriel, versed in mediæval and
Provençal lore, a man exceedingly handsome, who had captivated
Madame de Staël and other ladies besides Mary Clarke in his
friendships; and Julius Mohl, one of the first Orientalists in Europe, a
more ardent lover whom, after a probation of eighteen years, Miss
Clarke married in 1847. M. Mohl was once asked by Queen Victoria
why, loving Germany so much, he had given up his native country
for France. “Ma foi, madame,” he replied, “j'ètais amoureux.” With M.
Mohl, no less than with his wife, Florence Nightingale was on terms
of affectionate friendship. Among the frequent visitors whom she
and her sister met at Miss Clarke's were Madame Tastu (the
poetess), Élie de Beaumont (the geologist), Roulin (the traveller and
naturalist), Cousin, Mignet, Guizot, Tocqueville, Barthélemy St.
Hilaire, and Thiers. The last-named was one of Miss Clarke's earliest
admirers; and many years later, after the Franco-German war, when
Thiers was at the head of affairs, Lady Verney heard M. Mohl say to
his wife, “Madame, why did you not marry M. Thiers instead of me,
for now you would have been Queen of France?”
 In such circles as that which gathered around Miss Clarke,
Florence Nightingale was well qualified to hold her own and even to
play a brilliant part. Her life of gaiety on the Riviera and in Italy must
have rubbed away much of the shyness from which she had
suffered. If not beautiful, she was elegant and distinguished. She
was both widely and deeply read. She had many and varied
interests. She had powers of expression, in which clearness was not
unmixed with a note of humorous subacidity. These are social
advantages, and she was not without the inclination to use them.
She chose in the end another path—a path which was beset by
many obstacles of circumstance; but there were obstacles in herself
also, and one of the last “temptations” to be overcome, before she
was free to interpret her call and to act upon it, was (as she wrote in
many a page of confession and self-examination) “the desire to
shine in society.”

CHAPTER II

HOME LIFE
(1839–1845)
Her passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-
volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to
her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within,
soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never
justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous
consciousness of life beyond self.—George Eliot: Middlemarch.

The home life to which Florence Nightingale returned in April 1839

was rich in possibilities of social pleasure, and might have seemed to
promise every happiness. She was well fitted by nature and by
education to be an ornament of any country house; to shine in any
cultivated society; to become the wife, as many of her best friends
hoped and believed, of some good and clever man. But Florence, as
she passed from childhood to womanhood, came to form other
plans. Her life, as she ultimately shaped it, her example, which
circumstances were destined to render far-shining, have been potent
factors in opening new avenues for women in the modern world.
Thousands of women in these days are, in consequence of Florence
Nightingale's career, born free; but it was at a great price, and after
long and weary struggles, that she herself attained such freedom.
During the years with which, in this Part, we shall be concerned, she
lived in some sort the life of a caged bird.

The cage, however, was pleasantly gilded. Florence was not

always insensible of the gilding; there were times when she was
tempted to chafe no longer at its bars, and to accept a restricted life
within the conventional lines. I do not propose to detail, as might be
done from her letters, diaries, and other materials, the precise
succession of her goings and comings, her visits, and her home
pursuits. She herself gives an excellent reason in one of her diaries.
“Our movements are so regular,” she said; one year was very like
another. The setting of Florence Nightingale's life during this period
was such as many women have enjoyed, and many others have
envied. The lines of the Nightingale family were laid in pleasant
places. Their summer months were spent, as in preceding years, at
Lea Hurst. A portion of the season was spent in London, and the rest
of the year at Embley. On their return from the Continent in 1839,
the Nightingales spent some weeks in London, when the two girls
were presented at Court, and a letter to Miss Clarke shows Florence
absorbed in music, but not so completely as to conquer a lively
interest in the politics of the Bedchamber Plot:—

Carlton Hotel, Regent Street, June 1 [1839].… We are enjoying

ourselves much, for the Nicholsons, our cousins, came up to town the day
after we did, and are living in the same hotel with us in Regent Street, the
best situation in London, I think, but some people call it too noisy. As
Marianne Nicholson is as music-mad as I am, we are revelling in music all
day long. Schulz, who is a splendid player, and Crivelli, her singing master,
give us lessons, and the unfortunate piano has been strummed out of
tune in a week, not having even its natural rest at nights, as there are
other masters as well. We went to Pauline Garcia's début at the opera in
Otello. She was exceedingly nervous and trembled all over, but her great
improvement towards the end promised well. Her lower notes are very
fine indeed, and two shakes she made low down, though too much like
instrumental to be agreeable, were very extraordinary. Her voice,
however, is excessively unequal, and sometimes her singing is quite
commonplace. She makes too much of her execution, which is very
uneven. It is very easy to say that she will be another Malibran, but if they
were side by side the difference would be seen; so say wiser judges than
we. Even Grisi is quite superior to her in Desdemona, although P. Garcia's
voice is the most powerful, but then P. Garcia was excessively frightened.
We have heard her sing a duet with Persiani in which both were perfect,
and I heard Dohler for the[25] first time at the same concert. I was
nowise disappointed, although I had heard so much of him at Paris, his
execution is extraordinary, but I think one would soon grow tired of it, for
both his music and his style are very inferior to Thalberg's. Have you
heard Batta on the violoncello at Paris? His playing approaches more
nearly to the human voice than anything I ever heard. We are going to
hear charming Persiani to-night in the Lucia di Lammermoor. Tamburini,
the most good-natured of mortals, has volunteered to come and sing two
or three hours with my cousin Marianne every season, whenever she
thinks herself sufficiently advanced. We are going to hear him at a private
concert on Monday.

Now there has been enough and too much of musical news, but political
news is scarce.… London was in a perfect whirlwind of excitement for the
few days that the Melbourne ministry was out, but that is stale already.
Our little Queen, who was sadly unpopular when we first came to
England, recovered much of her former favour with the Whig party after
the firmness she showed in this affair. She was cheered and called forward
at the opera, which had not been done for months, and again returning
from chapel. And the birthday drawing-room was overflowing, whereas at
the two first she gave this season, there were hardly forty people! The
story of this last fracas is that on Tuesday, the day of Lord Melbourne's
resignation, the Queen dined upstairs with her mother, Baroness Lehzen,
and Lady F. Hastings, which she had never done since her accession, and
it is supposed that the amende honorable was then made to Lady Flora,
and that in this partie carrée was also arranged the course which was to
be pursued with Sir Robert Peel. The poor little Queen was seen in tears
by several people who told us in the course of the three days, and
struggled for her Ladies, as you see, manfully. However matters may turn
out now, it is said that she has taken so tremendous a dislike to Sir R.
Peel in this affair, that she will never send for him again.

Since that, the House has been adjourned for a fortnight and only met
last Monday when the Speaker was elected, Abercromby going up to the
House of Peers. We are rejoicing in the election of Shaw Lefevre, by a
majority of eighteen; rather less than was expected, however, Spring Rice
arriving half an hour too late to vote, which has made rather a
commotion. Shaw Lefevre is a great friend of ours, and a very agreeable
man, which is his chief qualification for the chair. Macaulay is not likely to
come into the Ministry; Lord Melbourne says that it is impossible to get on
with a man who talks so fast. So he is now writing history, and saying that
it is the only thing worth doing, except, however, standing for Edinburgh
in Abercromby's room[26] against Crawford. Macaulay has made an
admirable speech in favour of ballot there.

The Queen is vibrating between popularity and unpopularity, and it is

not yet known which way the scale will turn between the two parties; she
was very much applauded, and Lord Melbourne too, at Ascot yesterday.
He is likely to keep the upper hand, as the Tories have not such a man as
Lord John Russell in all their party, and the nine obstreperous Radicals
 have had a sop and give in their adhesion for the present. Papa is shocked
to hear that M. Guizot has declared himself so anti-English.…

We always talk of you and all that you did for us at Paris. I heard
yesterday that Gonfalonieri was coming to London in a month. Is he at
Paris now? I have just been reading the account of M. Mignet's éloge of
Talleyrand. I hope you were there, for it must have been very interesting,
but did not he make rather an extraordinary defence of Talleyrand's
political tergiversation, and of his conduct while the Allies were at Paris?
extraordinary to our ideas of political integrity. We met “ubiquity” Young
and Mr. Babbage yesterday at dinner at the E. Strutts', who told all sorts
of droll stories about Lord Brougham, who seems to have fairly lost his
wits. He had Lord Duncannon to dine with him the other day, which is
new, he having formerly stipulated when he went out to dinner that he
should see none of his former colleagues. He sends his carriage to stand
before Lord Denman's house for hours while he goes and walks in the
Park, or even while he is out of town, to give the idea that they are very
intimate.…

In another letter to Miss Clarke (Sept. 18), some further gossip is

given. Miss Nightingale was on her way back to London from Lea
Hurst, and had broken the journey at Nottingham:—

The next day we went up to town by rail in six and a half hours,
notwithstanding that the engine was twice out of order and stopped us.
We had very agreeable company on the road, a neighbour of ours and
equerry to the Queen,[12] who was full of her virtues and condescensions.
How much pleasanter it is travelling by these public conveyances than in
one's own stupid carriage. He said that Lord Melbourne called the Queen's
favourite terrier a frightful little beast, and often contradicted her flat, all
which she takes in good part, and lets him go to sleep after dinner,[27]
taking care that he shall not be waked.[13] She reads all the newspapers
and all the vilifying abuse which the Tories give her, and makes up her
mind that a queen must be abused, and hates them cordially.

II
 The Nightingales had taken up their residence at Embley in
September 1839, and remained there, in accordance with their wont,
till the early summer following. The charm of the place is vividly
described in a letter from Florence's sister to her cousin, Miss Hilary
Bonham Carter:—

My Love—It is so beautiful in this world! so very beautiful, you really

cannot fancy anything so near approaching to Eden or fairy-land, or il
paradiso terrestre as depicted in the 25th Canto, stanza 40 something; so
very, very lovely that we cannot resist a very strong desire that you should
come down and see it. My dear, I assure you we are worth seeing. I
never, though blest with many fair visions (both in my sleeping and my
waking hours), conceived anything so exquisite as to-day lying among the
flowers, such smells and such sounds hovering round me! Flo reading and
talking so that my immortal profited too, and she comforted me when I
said I must have much of the beast in me to be so very happy in the
sunshine and the flowers, by suggesting that God gave us His blessings to
enjoy them. So I am comforted, and set to work to enjoy with all my
might, and succeed à merveille. Still the garden is big, there are many
clumps of rhododendrons and azaleas, and showers of rosebuds, and I
cannot be all round them at once; so we want you to come and help, not
so much for your pleasure as to relieve the weight of responsibility, you
see.… My love, I am writing perched on a chair on the grass, nightingales
all round, blue sky above (such long shadows sleeping on the lawn), and
June smells about me. Will you not come? The rhododendrons are early
this year, and will be much passed in another ten days. Will you not
come? If you ask learned men they will tell you June at Embley is a poetry
ready made; and the first thing I shall do when I get to heaven (you'd
better set about getting there Miss Pop directly, you're a very long way off
at these[28] presents), where I expect to have the gift of language, is to
celebrate the pomps and beauties of the garden in this wicked world, than
which I never wish for a better.

Florence and her sister loved each other, but their characters were
widely different, as we shall hear, and their love at this time was not
that of perfect sympathy, but rather of wistful admiration on the one
side, and half-pitying fondness on the other. Parthenope looked upon
Florence as upon some strange being in another world, whose
happiness she passionately longed to see, and whose rejection of it
she could but dimly understand. Florence, on her side, regarded her
elder sister's contentment in the beauties of art and nature, and in
the world as she found it, with the tender pity which one may feel
for a happy child. “It would be an ill return for all her affection,”
wrote Florence to one of her aunts, “to drag down my White Swan
from her cool, fresh, blue sea of art into our baby chicken-yard of
struggling, scratting[14] life. How cruel it would be, as she is rocked
to rest there on her dreamy waves, for anybody to waken her.” The
difference in temperament between the sisters comes out very
clearly in their several descriptions of Embley. Florence was sensible
of its beauties, but they came to her with thoughts of a better world
beyond, or with echoes from the still sad music of humanity in the
world that now is. “I should have so liked you to see Embley in the
summer,” she wrote,[15] “for everything is such a blaze of beauty. I
had such a lovely walk yesterday before breakfast. The voice of the
birds is like the angels calling me with their songs, and the fleecy
clouds look like the white walls of our Home. Nothing makes my
heart thrill like the voice of the birds; but the living chorus so seldom
finds a second voice in the starved and earthly soul, which, like the
withered arm, cannot stretch forth its hand till Christ bids it.” A very
different note, it will be observed, from that which Parthenope—and
Pippa—heard from “the lark on the wing.” And so, too, with regard
to the house at Embley. Mr. Nightingale had found it a plain,
substantial building of the Georgian period. He enlarged it into an
ornate mansion in the Elizabethan style. His wife and elder daughter
were much occupied with the interest of furnishing it appropriately,
and Mr. Nightingale was greatly pleased with his alterations. “Do you
know,” said Florence, as she walked with an American friend on the
lawn in front of the drawing-room, “what I always think when I look
at that row of windows? I think how I should turn it into a hospital,
and just how I should place the beds.”[16]

III

Embley was now a large house, with accommodation enough to

receive at one time, as Florence recorded in a letter, “five able-
bodied married females, with their husbands and belongings.” The
large number of Mr. Nightingale's brothers and sisters, some of
whom had many sons and daughters, made the family circle of the
Nightingales a very wide one. Between four of the families the
intercourse was particularly close—the Nightingales, the Nicholsons,
the Bonham Carters, and the Samuel Smiths. One of Mrs.
Nightingale's sisters married Mr. George Thomas Nicholson, of
Waverley Abbey, near Farnham, Surrey.[17] Among their children,
Marianne was as a girl a great friend of her cousin Florence. In 1851
Miss Nicholson married Captain (afterwards Sir) Douglas Galton,
who, some few years later, became closely and helpfully connected
with Miss Nightingale's work. To Mr. Nicholson's sister, “Aunt
Hannah,” Florence was greatly attached. Another of
Mrs. Nightingale's sisters married Mr. John Bonham Carter, of
Ditcham, near Petersfield, for many years M.P. for Portsmouth. His
eldest daughter, Joanna Hilary, was a particular friend of Florence
Nightingale, who said that of all her contemporaries within her circle,
her cousin Hilary was the most gifted. One of the sons, Mr. Henry
Bonham Carter, was, and is, Secretary of the Nightingale Fund, and
Miss Nightingale appointed him one of her executors. Between the
Nightingales and the Samuel Smiths the relationship was double.
Mrs. Nightingale's brother, Mr. Samuel Smith, of Combe Hurst,
Surrey, married Mary Shore, sister of Mr. Nightingale; moreover, their
son, Mr. William Shore Smith, was the heir (after his mother) to the
entailed land at Embley and Lea Hurst, in default of a son to
Mr. Nightingale. The eldest child of Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Smith,
Blanche, married Arthur Hugh Clough, the poet, who, as we shall
hear, was closely associated with Miss Nightingale. There were many
other relations; but without being troubled to go into further details,
which might tax severely even the authoress of the Pillars of the
House, the reader will perceive that Florence Nightingale was well
provided with uncles, aunts, and cousins.

The fact is of some significance in understanding the

circumstances of her life at this time, and the nature of her struggle
for independence. Emancipated or revolting daughters are
sometimes pardoned or condoned if they can aver that they have
few home ties. To Mrs. Nightingale it may have seemed that in the
domestic intercourse within so large a family circle, any comfortable
daughter might find abundance of outlet and interest. And so, in one
respect at least, her daughter Florence did. The maternal instinct in
her, for which she was not in her own person to find fruition, went
out in almost passionate fulness to the young cousin, William Shore
Smith, mentioned above. He was “her boy,” she used to say, from
the day on which he was put as a baby into her arms when she was
eleven years old. Up to the time of his going up to Cambridge, he
spent a portion of his holidays in every year at Lea Hurst or Embley.
Florence's letters at such times were full of him. She was
successively his nurse, playfellow, and tutor. “The son of my heart,”
she called him; “while he is with me all that is mine is his, my head
and hands and time.”
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