Digital Image

Fundamentals

Lecture # 2

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 Human Eye

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 Human Eye

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 Visual Receptors

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 Visual Receptors
Retina
Cones (photopic or bright-light vision)
6-7 million cones
One per nerve
Human can resolve fine details with cones
Located in fovea (central portion)
Sensitive to color
Rods (scotopic or dim-light vision)
75-150 million rods
Several per nerve
Distributed over retinal surface
Sensitive to low level of illumination

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 Visual Receptors

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 Visual Receptors
Blind spot in eye
~17o off axis

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 Blind Spot
The distance between the + and the dot should be between 5
and 7 inches. Cover your LEFT eye, and with your RIGHT eye,
look at the + on the LEFT. (So that you're looking past your
nose a little bit.) Now very slowly move your head closer or
away from the screen, until the dot on the right disappears.
Remember, you have to be looking at the +, as you notice the
dot disappear.

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 Distribution of Rods and Cones

Cones are most dense in the centre of the retina.

Rods increases in density from the centre out to approximately 20 deg off
axis and then decreases in density out to extreme periphery.

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 Human Visual System
Brightness Perception
Not a simple function of intensity (entering dark room)
Depends on adjacency (Overshoot or undershoot
around the boundary of region).
Depends on background (Simultaneous contrast)

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 Under / Over shoot
Brightness is not a simple function of
intensity.

Visual system tends to undershoot or

overshoot around the boundary of regions
of different intensities.

The intensity of the stripes is constant but

we actually perceive a brightness pattern
which is strongly scalloped near the
boundaries.

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 Simultaneous Contrast

Center is
of same
gray
level in
all four
pictures

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 Optical illusions
Eye fills in non-existing information or wrongly
perceives geometrical properties of object

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 Optical illusions
Eye fills in non-existing information or wrongly
perceives geometrical properties of object

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 In each of the two illustrations above, one square is
surrounded by four rectangles larger than the center
square in one drawing, smaller in the other. The center
square that is surrounded by smaller rectangles appears to
be larger than the center square surrounded by larger
rectangles. In reality, the center squares are the same size.

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 Find the black dot
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 VISUAL ILLUSION

Find the black dot

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 VISUAL ILLUSION

Which lines are straight?

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 Image Acquisition

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 Image description
f (x,y): intensity/brightness of the image at spatial coordinates (x,y)

0< f (x,y)< and determined by 2 factors:

illumination component i(x,y): amount of source light incident
reflectance component r(x,y): amount of light reflected by objects

f (x,y) = i(x,y) r(x,y)

where
0< i(x,y)<: determined by the light source
0< r(x,y)<1: determined by the characteristics of objects

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 Digital Image
2 D function f (x,y), where
x and y are spatial (plane) coordinates.
Amplitude of f at any pair of coordinates x, y is called
the intensity or gray level of the image at any point.
When (x,y) and amplitude of f are finite, discrete
quantities, we call the image as Digital Image

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 Digital Image
f(x,y) x
f(0,0)

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 Example
640 x 480 8-bit image

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 Digital Images
Digital images are 2D arrays (matrices) of numbers:

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 Digital Image
A gray scale digital image is nothing else than an array of
number (a matrix).
The image consists of a large number of tiny squares called
pixels (PICture ELements).
The matrix representing a digital image assigns a value to each
pixel.
Typically this value is a real number between 0 and 255

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 Digital Image
Once an image is represented as a matrix, all tools we know
for matrices become available for processing the image.
Therefore many image processing methods are based on
linear algebra

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 Resolution
Resolution (how much you can see the detail of the
image) depends on
Sampling
Quantization (Gray levels)
The bigger the sampling rate (n) and the gray scale
(g), the better the approximation of the digitized
image from the original.
The increase in the quantization scale increases the
size of the digitized image.

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 Sampling and Quantization

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 Sampling and Quantization

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 Sampling and Quantization
Sampling: Digitization of the spatial coordinates (x,y)
Quantization: Digitization in amplitude (also called gray-level quantization)

8 bit quantization: 28 = 256 gray levels (0: black, 255: white)

Binary (1 bit quantization): 2 gray levels (0: black, 1: white)

Commonly used number of samples (resolution)

Digital still cameras: 640x480, 1024x1024, up to 4064 x 2704
Digital video cameras: 640x480 at 30 frames/second
1920x1080 at 60 f/s (HDTV)

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 Spatial and Gray-Level Resolution
Spatial Resolution
Sampling is the principal factor
Spatial resolution is the smallest discernible detail in an image
Insufficient spatial resolution result in appearance of
checkerboard pattern in the image
Gray-Level Resolution
Quantization is the principal factor
Smallest discernible change in gray level

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 Spatial and Gray-Level Resolution

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 Spatial Resolution

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 Spatial Resolution

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 Grey-Level Resolution

256 gray level 128 gray level

64 gray level 32 gray level

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 Grey-Level Resolution

8 gray level
16 gray level

False contouring

4 gray level 2 gray level

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Effect of Sampling and Quantization

250 x 210 samples 125 x 105 samples 50 x 42 samples 25 x 21 samples

256 gray levels

16 gray levels 8 gray levels 4 gray levels Binary image

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 RGB (color) Images

Red + Blue + Green

Red Green Blue

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 Number Gray Levels and Bits for Storage
The number of gray levels typically is an
integer power of 2

L = 2k (K=no of bits)
K=3 -> L=8; 8 gray level

Number of bits required to store a digitized

image
b=MxNxk

M=N=10, K=3
b=300 bits. 300 bits required to store an image

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 Required storage bits (N=M)

1. b=(M*N*K) = 32*32*1 = 1024 bits (when k=1 -> L=2)

2. b=(M*N*K) = 32*32*2 = 2048 bits (when k=2 -> L=4)

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 Digital Image Processing
Digital Image
...a sampled, quantized function of two dimensions that
has been generated by optical means, sampled in an
equally spaced rectangular grid pattern, and quantized in
equal intervals of amplitude.
Processing
...starts with one image and produces a modified version
of that image [without interpreting it]

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 Representation of Digital Image

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 Representation of Digital Image

An M x N digital image is expressed as

Columns
f (0,0) f (0,1) . . . f (0, N 1)
f (1,0) f (1,1) . . . f (1, N 1)
Rows

. . . . . .

. . . . . .
. . . . . .

f ( M 1,0) f ( M 1,1) . . . f ( M 1, N 1)

N : No of Columns
M : No of Rows

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 Mathematical Representation
Pixel Intensity as a Function of Row/column Position
Matrix Representation
Translation, rotation, and other operations performed by
matrix multiplications

f 0, 0 f 0,1 f 0, M 1
f 1, 0 f 1,1 f 1, M 1
I f x, y


f N 1, 0 f N 1,1 f N 1, M 1

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