Ch2.

Digital Image Fundamentals

Ch2. Digital Image Fundamentals

Dr. M Khairul Islam

[email protected]

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 Ch2. Digital Image Fundamentals

Contents

2.1 Elements of visual perception

2.2 Light and the electromagnetic spectrum
2.3 Image sensing and acquisition
2.4 Image sampling and quantization
2.5 Some basic relationships between pixels
2.6 Linear and nonlinear operation

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2.1 Elements of visual perception

 Structure of the human eye

– Cornea and sclera
– Choroid: ciliary body, iris
diaphragm
– Retina: fovea

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– Retina has two classes of receptors

• Cones:
 Each eye has 6~7 million of cones
 Highly sensitive to color and bright light
 photopic or bright-light vision
• Rods:
 Each eye has 75~150 million of rods
 Not involved in color vision and sensitive to low levels of
illumination
Ex) colored objects appear as colorless forms at moonlight
 scotopic or dim-light vision

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– distribution of rods and cones in the retina

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 Image formation in the eye

– Lens : their shape is controlled by tension in the fibers of
the ciliary body
• To focus on distant objects, the lens become flatter
• To focus on near objects, the lens become thicker
– Focal length
• The distance between the center of the lens and the retina
• approximately 14mm~17mm
• 15 : 100 = h : 17 or h = 2.55mm

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 Brightness adaptation and

discrimination
– Subjective brightness is a
logarithmic function of the light
intensity
– The range of light intensity levels
to which the human visual system
can adapt is enormous (on the
order of 1010)
– In photonic vision alone, the range
is about 106
– The transition from scotopic to
photopic vision is gradual over the
approximate range from 0.001 to
0.1 mililambert

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– Brightness adaptation:
• The visual system cannot operate over such a range
simultaneously.
– Weber ratio: Ic/I
 Ic : the increment of illumination discriminable 50% of the
time with background illumination I
• The small ratio, the larger disciminable
• The larger ratio, the poorer discriminable

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– Perceived brightness is
not a simple function of
intensity
• Two phenomena
1) Mach band
2) Simultaneous contrast
– Mach band
• The intensity of the
stripes is constant,
but we actually
perceive more
brightness near the
boundaries

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– Simultaneous contrast :
• A region’s perceived brightness does not depend simply on
its intensity.

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– Optical illusion:
• The eye fills in
nonexisting information
or wrongly perceives
geometrical properties of
objects.
• A characteristics of the
human visual system that
is not fully understood.

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2.2 Light and electromagnetic spectrum

 Electromagnetic spectrum
– Visible light represents a very small portion of the EM
spectrum

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– Relationship between wavelength(  ) and frequency( )

=c/
c : light speed (2.998x108 m/s)

– The energy of EM spectrum :

E=h

h : Planck’s constant

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2.3 Image sensing and acquisition

 Image sensing
– Transform illumination
energy into digital
images
 Three principal sensor
arrangements
1) Single imaging sensor
2) Line sensor
3) Array sensor

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 Image acquisition using a single sensor

– Ex: photodiode
– Fig 2.13: to generate 2-D image using a single sensor

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 Image acquisition using sensor strips

– Ex: flat bed scanners, airborne imaging system
– 2-D and 3-D image(CAT, MRI, PET)

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 Image acquisition using sensor arrays

– Ex: CCD array in digital cameras

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 A simple image formation model

– Image function f(x,y) is characterized by two
components
• Illumination component: i(x,y)
• Reflection component: r(x,y)
f ( x, y )  i ( x, y )  r ( x, y )
where 0  i ( x, y )  , 0  r ( x, y )  1

• Reflectance: 0-> total absorption, 1-> total reflectance

– Example 2.1
• Illumination: Sunny day: 90,000 lm/m2(Lux), cloudy day:
10,000 lm/m2, Full moon: 0.1 lm/m2 , office: 1,000 lm/m2
• Reflectance: black velvet: 0.01, stainless steel: 0.65,
flat-white wall paint: 0.90, sliver-plated metal: 0.93
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2.4 Image sampling and quantization

 Basic concepts
– Sampling:
digitizing the
coordinate values
– Quantization:
digitizing the
amplitude values

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 Representing digital images

– matrix form for M(rows) x N(column) digital image
 f (0,0) f (0,1)  f (0, N  1) 
 f (1,0) f (1,1)  f (1, N  1) 
f ( x, y )  
    
 
 f ( M  1,0) f ( M  1,1)  f ( M  1, N  1)

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– Number of gray levels typically is an integer power of 2:

 L  2k
– Number of bits:

b  M  N k
if M  N , b  N 2 k

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 Spatial and gray-level resolution

– Spatial resolution: smallest discernible detail in an image
– Gray-level resolution: smallest discernible change in gray
level

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– Example 2.3:
• False contouring appear when using 16 or less gray levels

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– Isopreference curves
• Points lying on an isopreference curve correspond to
images of equal subjective quality.
• Images with large detail is nearly independent of the
number of gray levels used
 Isopreference curve is nearly vertical
 Ex) crowd
• Perceived quality in the images with low and medium
detail remains the same when the N is increased but k is
decreased.
 Ex) Face and Cameraman

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isopreference curves

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 Aliasing and Moire patterns

– Shannon sampling theorem
• Sampling rate should be equal to or greater than twice its
highest frequency to recover completely the original
function from its samples.
• Otherwise, aliasing occurs
– Moire pattern (Fig. 2.24)
 Zooming and shrinking digital images
– Zooming: oversampling; Shrinking: undersampling
– Zooming steps:
1.Creation of new pixel locations
2.Assignment of gray levels to those new location

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– Methods of gray-
level assignment
• Nearest neighbor
interpolation
• Bilinear
interpolation
– To reduce possible
aliasing effects, blur
the image before
shrinking
– Example 2.4

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2.5 Some basic relationship between pixels

 Neighbors of pixel
– N4(p): 4-neighbors of p
• {(x+1, y), (x-1, y), (x, y+1), (x, y-1)}
– ND(p): 4 diagonal neighbors of p
• {(x+1, y+1), (x+1, y-1), (x-1, y+1), (x-1, y-1)}
– N8(p): 8-neighbors of p
• N4(p)+ ND(p) (x-1,y-1) (x,y-1) (x+1,y-1)

P
(x-1,y) (x+1,y)
(x,y)

(x-1,y+1) (x,y+1) (x+1,y+1)

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 Adjacency, connectivity, regions, and boundaries

– Adjacency
• Let V be the set of gray-level values used to define
adjacency. In a binary image, V={1}
• Three types
1) 4-adjacency: p and q with V are 4-adjacency if q is in N4(p)
2) 8-adjacency: if q is in N8(p)
3) m-adjacency(mixed):
① If q is in N4(p), or
② If q is in ND(p) and the set N4(p)  N4(q) has no pixels

Ambiguity is removed

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– Boundary(border or contour)
• Closed path
• “global” concept
– Edge
• Intensity discontinuities
• “local” concept
 Distance measures
– For pixels p, q, z with coordinates (x,y), (s,t), (v,w), D is a
distance function or metric if
1) D(p,q)  0 (D(p,q) = 0 iff p=q)
2) D(p,q) = D(q,p), and
3) D(p,z)  D(p,q) + D(q,z)

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– Euclidean distance
• De(p,q) = [(x-s)2 + (y-t)2]1/2
– D4 distance (city-block distance)
• D4(p,q) = |x-s| + |y-t|
• Ex: D4 distance  2
2
2 1 2
2 1 0 1 2
2 1 2
2

• The pixels with D4 = 1 are the 4-neighbors of (x,y).

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– D8 distance (chessboard distance)

• D8(p,q) = max(|x-s|,|y-t|)
• Ex: D8 distance  2

2 2 2 2 2
2 1 1 1 2
2 1 0 1 2
2 1 1 1 2
2 2 2 2 2

• The pixels with D8 = 1 are the 8-neighbors of (x,y).

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– Dm distance
• Shortest m-path between the points
• Example

P3 p4
p1 p2 V={1}
p
① If p1 = 0, P3 = 0, Dm = 2
② If p1 = 1, P3 = 0, Dm = 3
③ If p1 = 1, P3 = 1, Dm = 4
 Image operations on a pixel basis
– Arithmetic and logic operations are defined between
corresponding pixels in the images involved.

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2.6 Linear and nonlinear operations

 Linear operation
– H is linear operator if, for two images f and g and any
two scalars a and b,
H(af + bg) = aH(f) + bH(g)
– Ex) an operator that computes the sum of K images
 Nonlinear operation
– An operator that fails the above equation.
– Ex) an operator that computes the absolute values of the
difference of two images

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