Introduction - The Big Picture

Applications of Image Processing

• Improvement of pictorial information for human interpretation -- Image Enhancement and Restoration. Both input and output are in the image form.
  • Computerized photography
  • Space image processing (Hubble space telescope images, interplanetary probe images, etc.)
  • Medical/Biological image processing
• Extraction information from images for further computer analysis -- Image Understanding and Image Recognition.

  Input is in image form, and output is none image representation of the image content, such as description, interpretation, classification, etc.

  • Automatic character recognition
  • Finger print/face recognition
  • Military applications (I'd rather not talk about...)
  • Medical applications (interpretations of X-ray images, blood/cellular microscope images, etc.)
  • Aerial and satellite image interpretations
  • Industrial applications (product inspection, etc.)
• Image processing can be considered as the preprocessing stage of computer (machine) vision of an artificial intelligent system (robots, autonomous vehicles, etc.).

  Computer vision is in parallel to the study of biological vision, as a major effort in brain study.

Fundamental Steps in Digital Image Processing

These steps roughly correspond to the visual information processing in the brain.