Digital Image Processing

Fundamentals

Digital Image Processing

 What is digital image processing (DIP)?
 Digital images:
 A pixel has a location (the spatial coordinate) and
a value.
 Digital images can be from many types of sources.
 Digital image processing
 Digital image processing is closely related to
signal processing at one end, and to computer
vision at the other end.

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 Computer Vision
 Computer vision:
 Computer vision is concerned with making
computers “understand” what is contained in an
image and other functions of human vision.
 It is sometimes considered to be a topic of
artificial intelligence.
 However, it is not possible to state exactly where
image processing ends and computer vision begins.
 If you compare a digital image processing book
and a computer vision book, you will find a lot of
overlap.

Human and Computer Vision

 We can’t think of image processing
without considering the human vision
system. We observe and evaluate the
images that we process with our visual
system.
 Without taking this elementary fact into
consideration, we may be much misled in
the interpretation of images.
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 Simple questions
 What intensity differences can we distinguish?
 What is the spatial resolution of our eye?
 How accurately we estimate and compare
distances and areas?
 How do we sense colors?
 By which features can we detect and
distinguish objects?

Human Eye

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 Structure of the Human Eye
 Shape is nearly a sphere.
 Average diameter = 20 mm.
 3 membranes:
 Cornea and Sclera
– outer cover
 Choroid

 Retina -enclose the eye

Structure of the Human Eye

 Cornea :
 tough, transparent tissue, covers the anterior

surface of the eye.

 Sclera :
 Opaque membrane, encloses the remainder of the

optic globe
 Choroid :
 Lies below the sclera, contains network of blood

vessels that serve as the major source of nutrition

to the eye.

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 Structure of the Human Eye
 Lens
 both infrared and ultraviolet light are absorbed

appreciably by proteins within the lens structure

and, in excessive amounts, can cause damage to the
eye.
 Retina
 Innermost membrane of the eye which lines inside

of the wall’s entire posterior portion. When the eye

is properly focused, light from an object outside the
eye is imaged on the retina.

Receptors
 Pattern vision is afforded by the distribution of
discrete light receptors over the surface of the retina.
 Receptors are divided into 2 classes:
 Cones: 6-7 million, located primarily in the central

portion of the retina, highly sensitive to color, and

each is connected to its own nerve end
 Rods : 75-150 million, distributed over the retina

surface, several rods are connected to a single

nerve, and sensitive to low levels of illumination

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 Test images

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Test images
 Test images for distances and area estimation:
a) Parallel lines with up to 5% difference in length.
b) Circles with up to 10% difference in radius.
c) The vertical line appears longer but actually has the
same length as the horizontal line.
d) Deception by perspective: the upper line appears
longer than the lower one but actually have the same
length.

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Test images

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Test images

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 Signals
 A signal is a function that carries information.
usually content of the signal changes over some
set of spatiotemporal dimensions.
 Signals vary over time:
f(t)
 f(t) for example: audio signal may be
thought at one level as a collection various
tones of differing audible frequencies that
vary over time.
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Spatially-Varying Signals
 Signals can vary over space as well. An image
can be thought of as being a function of 2
spatial dimensions:
f(x,y)
 for monochromatic images, the value of the

function is the amount of light at that point.

medical CAT and MRI scanners produce
images that are functions of 3 spatial
dimensions:
f(x,y,z)
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 Spatiotemporal Signals
 What do you think a signal of this form
is?
f(x,y,t)
 x and y are spatial dimensions; t is time.
Perhaps, it is a video signal, animation, or
other time-varying picture sequence.

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Types of Signals
 Most naturally-occurring signals are
functions having a continuous domain.
however, signals in a computer have are
discrete samples of the continuous
domain. In other words, signals
manipulated by computer have discrete
domains.

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 Analog & Digital
 Most naturally-occurring signals also have a
real-valued range in which values occur with
infinite precision. to store and manipulate
signals by computer we need to store these
numbers with finite precision. thus, these
signals have a discrete range.
 signal has continuous domain and range = analog
 signal has discrete domain and range = digital

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Sampling & Quantization

 Sampling = the spacing of discrete values in the
domain of a signal.
 sampling-rate = how many samples are taken per unit
of each dimension. e.g., samples per second, frames
per second, etc. f(t)
 Quantization = spacing of discrete values in
the range of a signal.
 usually thought of as the number of bits per sample
of the signal. e.g., 1 bit per pixel (b/w images), 16-
bit audio, 24-bit color images, etc.
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 Image Representation
 A digital image is an image f(x,y) that has
been digitized both in spatial coordinates
and brightness.
 the value of f at any point (x,y) is
proportional to the brightness (or gray
level) of the image at that point.

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Image Representation

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 Image Representation
 A digital image can be considered a
matrix whose row and column indices
identify a point in the image and the
corresponding matrix element value
identifies the gray level at that point.

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Image Representation

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 Sampling and Quantization

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Light-intensity function
 image refers to a 2D light-intensity function,
f(x,y) the amplitude of f at spatial coordinates
(x,y) gives the intensity (brightness) of the
image at that point. light is a form of energy
thus f(x,y) must be nonzero and finite.

0< f(x,y)<∞

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 Illumination and Reflectance
 the basic nature of f(x,y) may be
characterized by 2 components:
 the amount of source light incident on the
scene being viewed Illumination, i(x,y)
 the amount of light reflected by the objects
in the scene Reflectance, r(x,y)

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Illumination and Reflectance

 determined by the nature of the light

source

 determined by the nature of the objects

in a scene bounded from total absorption
to total reflectance.
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Gray level

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Number of bits

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Resolution

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Checkerboard effect

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 False contouring

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Relationship between pixels

 Neighbors of a pixel
 Connectivity
 Distance Measures
 Arithmetic/Logic Operations

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 Neighbors of a pixel

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Connectivity
 Let V be the set of gray-level values used to defined
connectivity
 4-connectivity : 2 pixels p and q with values from V are 4-
connected if q is in the set N4 (p)
 8-connectivity :2 pixels p and q with values from V are 8-
connected if q is in the set N8 (p)
 m-connectivity (mixed connectivity): 2 pixels p and q with
values from V are m-connected if
 q is in the set N4 (p) or

 q is in the set ND (p) and the set N4(p)∩N4 (q) is empty.

 (the set of pixels that are 4-neighbors of both p and q

whose values are from V )

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 Example
 m-connectivity eliminates the multiple
path connections that arise in 8-
connectivity.

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Adjacent
 a pixel p is adjacent to a pixel q if they
are connected.
 two image area subsets S1 and S2 are
adjacent if some pixel in S1 is adjacent
to some pixel S2.

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 Path
 a path from pixel p with coordinates (x,y) to
pixel q with coordinates (s,t) is a sequence of
distinct pixels with coordinates
(x0,y0),(x1,y1),…(xn,yn) where
(x0,y0) = (x,y) , (xn,yn) = (s,t) and (xi,yi) is
adjacent to (xi-1,yi-1)
 n is the length of the path
 we can define 4-,8-, or m-paths depending on
type of adjacency specified.
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Exercise

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Distance Measures

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Euclidean distance

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City-block distance:
D4 distance

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Chessboard distance: D8
distance

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D4 and D8 distances

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m-connectivity’s distance

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Arithmetic Operators

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Logic operations

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Mask Operation

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Mask Operation

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 Mask operator

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Mask coefficient
 Proper selection of the coefficients and
application of the mask at each pixel position in
an image makes possible a variety of useful
image operations
 noise reduction

 region thinning

 edge detection

 Applying a mask at each pixel location in an

image is a computationally expensive task.
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 Image Geometry
 Basic Transformations : expressed in 3D
Cartesian coordinate system (x,y,z)
 Translation
 Scaling
 Rotation
 Concatenation and inverse transformation

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Translation

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 Geometry General Form
V* = AV
A : 4x4 transformation matrix
V : column vector containing the original
coordinates
V* : column vector whose components
are the transformed coordinates

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Translation matrix

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Scaling

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Rotation

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Rotation

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Rotation

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 Concatenation and inverse
transformation

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