DIGITAL IMAGE PROCESSING

ABSTRACT:
There is an adage which says a picture speaks a thousand words - a complex idea can be conveyed with just a single still image. Looking through the past decade image viewing has enhanced drastically with the use of high-end technologies. These technologies offer a wide range of applications, hugely in medical and forensic departments. One kind of image enhancement technique is the DIGITAL IMAGE PROCESSING. This technique uses computer algorithms to perform image processing on digital images.

BASIC OUTLINE OF DIGITAL IMAGE PROCESSING:

Digital image processing was made easier when cheaper computers started creating a film or electronic image of any picture or paper form. It is accomplished by scanning or photographing an object and turning it into a matrix of dots (bitmap), which is unknown to the computer, it is only to the human viewer. Scanned images of text may be encoded into computer data (ASCII or E BCDIC) with page recognition software (OCR). Image processing aims to duplicate the effect of human vision by electronically perceiving and understanding an image using computer vision. Computer vision is the science and technology of machines that see, where see in this case means that the machine is able to extract information from an image that is necessary to solve some task. In a scientific discipline, computer vision is concerned with the theory behind artificial systems that extract information from images. The image data can take many forms, such as video sequences, views from multiple cameras, or multidimensional data from a medical scanner.

DIGITAL IMAGE PROCESSING TECHNIQUES:

Image Image Image Image Image Image sampling quantization enhancement restoration compression analysis

IMAGE SAMPLING:
The acquisition of a data frame involves a spatial sampling and digitalization of the continuous image formed in the focus plane. The image may be recorded analog (e.g. on photographic plates) for later measurements or acquired directly when

digital detectors such as diode arrays and CCD's are used. The individual pixel values are obtained by convolving the continuous image I(x,y) with the pixel response function R(x,y). With a sampling step of x and y the digital frame is given by,

Fi,j=

I(x,y) R(x-ix,y-jy) dxdy + Ni.j

IMAGE QUANTIZATION:
To be represented in a digital computer, every signal must be quantized once sampled. Quantization is the process seeking to reduce the number of colors required to represent an image. Although more frequent in the past, currently color quantization is only used in 8-bit (256 color) images, as GIF images and some PNG images. A standard quantization algorithm works in 2 steps: 1. Analyze the image to select the new color palette. Usually, this involves checking each pixel to choose the most frequent colors. 2. Dither the image to the new color palette.

IMAGE ENHANCEMENT:
The aim of image enhancement is to improve the interpretability or perception of information in images for human viewers, or to provide `better' input for other automated image processing techniques. Some of image enhancement techniques are histogram manipulation and image filtering. Image enhancement techniques can be divided into two broad categories: 1. Spatial domain methods, which operate directly on pixels, and 2. Frequency domain methods, which operate on the Fourier transform of an image.

IMAGE RESTORATION:
The purpose of image restoration is to "compensate for" or "undo" defects which degrade an image. Degradation comes in many forms such as motion blur, noise, and camera misfocus. In cases like motion blur, it is possible to come up with a very good estimate of the actual blurring function and "undo" the blur to restore the original image. In cases where the image is corrupted by noise, the best we may hope to do is to compensate for the degradation it caused. The block diagram for our general degradation model is

Where g is the corrupted image obtained by passing the original image f through a low pass filter (blurring function) b and adding noise to it. The four different ways of restoring the image are, Inverse Filter: In this method we look at an image assuming a known blurring function. Weiner Filtering: In this method we implement image restoration using wiener filtering, which provides us with the optimal trade-off between de-noising and inverse filtering. Wavelet Restoration: Here we implement three wavelet based algorithms to restore the image. Blind Deconvolution: In this method, we assume nothing about the image. We do not have any information about the blurring function or on the additive noise.

IMAGE COMPRESSION:
Image compression deals with reducing the amount of data required to represent a digital image by removing of redundant data such as: 1. Coding Redundancy 2. Interpixel Redundancy 3. Psycho visual Redundancy Encoding the contents of a 2-D image in a raw bitmap format is usually not economical and may result in very large files. Since raw image representations usually require a large amount of storage space and proportionally long transmission times in the case of file uploads/ downloads, most image file formats employ some type of compression. The need to save storage space and shorten transmission time, as well as the human visual system tolerance to a modest amount of loss, have been the driving factors behind image compression techniques such as the Lossy technique and the Lossless technique.

IMAGE ANALYSIS:
It deals with the automatic extraction of information from an image or sequence of images. It is also an essential part of computer vision systems. Image analysis tasks can be as simple as reading bar coded tags or as sophisticated as identifying a person from their face. There are many different techniques used in automatically analyzing images. Examples of image analysis techniques in different fields include: Object recognition Image segmentation Motion detection video tracking optical flow

medical scan analysis Automatic number plate recognition etc.

CONCLUSION: Many of the hurdles of the emerging technology of digital image processing are now subsiding. More and more practitioners are constantly expanding the horizons of practical applications on digital image processing. As an example, the problems in the fields of document storage and retrieval would appear to lend themselves to solutions based on present-day concepts of digital image processing. A document which has been digitized could be stored and recalled, processed, and transferred using presently available equipment and techniques. Such an application would truly bring the technology down from its ethereal heights to the everyday world of millions of people. However, this is still only the beginning. Indeed, much more study and investigation remains to be done.