Introduction - The Big Picture

Image Processing and Related Fields

• Signal processing
• Image processing
• Computer/Machine/Robot vision
• Biological vision
• Artificial intelligence
• Machine learning
• Pattern recognition

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

In this class of Image Processing and Analysis, we will cover some basic concepts and algorithms in image processing and pattern classification. The specific topics to be discussed in the course are some subset of these topics.

A popular textbook in image processing is Digital Image Processing, 4th edition

Applications of Image Processing

Visual information is the most important type of information perceived, processed and interpreted by the human brain. One third of the cortical area of the human brain is dedicated to visual information processing.

Digital image processing, as a computer-based technology, carries out automatic processing, manipulation and interpretation of such information, and it plays an increasingly important role in many aspects of our daily life, as well as in a wide variety of disciplines and fields in science and technology, with applications such as television, photography, robotics, remote sensing, medical diagnosis and industrial inspection.

• Computerized photography (e.g., photoshop)
• Space image processing (e.g., Hubble space telescope images, interplanetary probe images)
• Medical/Biological image processing (e.g., interpretation of X-ray images, blood/cellular microscope images)
• Automatic character recognition (zip code, license plate recognition)
• Finger print/face/iris recognition
• Remote sensing: aerial and satellite image interpretations
• Reconnaissance
• Industrial applications (e.g., product inspection/sorting)

Different Types of Tasks

• Image acquisition, storage, transmission: digitization/quantization, compression, encoding/decoding

• Image Enhancement and Restoration: for improvement of the quality of the pictorial information for human interpretation, both input and output are in the image form (e.g., the first few application examples above).

• Image Understanding and Image Recognition: information extraction from images for further computer analysis (e.g., the rest of the application examples above). Input is in image form, but output is some none image representation of the image content, such as description, interpretation, classification, etc.

• Pre-processing stage of computer vision of an artificial intelligent system (robots, autonomous vehicles, etc.).

Fundamental Steps in Digital Image Processing

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