Unit 1 - Introduction and Digital Image Fundamentals

Digital Image Fundamentals: An image is also a two-dimensional array specifically

arranged in rows and columns. Digital Image is composed of picture elements, image
elements, and pixels. A Pixel is most widely used to denote the elements of a Digital Image.
A digital grayscale image is presented in the computer by pixels matrix. Each pixel of such
an image is presented by one matrix element – an integer from the set. The numeric values in
pixel presentation are uniformly changed from zero (black pixels) to 255 (white pixels).
When it comes to a binary or boolean image that comprises of only two colours, i.e., black
and white, the matrix represents the colour black as 0 and the colour white as 1.

Human visual system:

Image as a 2D data: A digital image is a 2D array of pixels. Each pixel is characterised by
its (x, y) coordinates and its value. Digital images are characterised by matrix size, pixel
depth and resolution. The matrix size is determined from the number of the columns (m) and
the number of rows (n) of the image matrix (m × n).
The size of a matrix is selected by the operator. Generally, as the matrix dimension increases
the resolution is getting better (Gonzalez et al., 2009). Nuclear medicine images matrices are,
nowadays, ranged from 64 × 64 to 1024 × 1024 pixels. Pixel or bit depth refers to the number
of bits per pixel that represent the colour levels of each pixel in an image.

Image representation – Grayscale and Color images

There are three types of images. They are as following:

Binary Images: It is the simplest type of image. It takes only two values i.e, Black and White
or 0 and 1. The binary image consists of a 1-bit image and it takes only 1 binary digit to
represent a pixel. Binary images are mostly used for general shape or outline.
Example: Optical Character Recognition (OCR).
Binary images are generated using threshold operation. When a pixel is above the threshold
value, then it is turned white'(1') and which are below the threshold value then they are turned
black('0')

Gray-scale images: Grayscale images are monochrome images, Means they have only one
color. Grayscale images do not contain any information about color. Each pixel determines
available different grey levels.
A normal grayscale image contains 8 bits/pixel data, which has 256 different grey levels. In
medical images and astronomy, 12 or 16 bits/pixel images are used.
 Unit 1 - Introduction and Digital Image Fundamentals

Colour images: Colour images are three band monochrome images in which, each band
contains a different color and the actual information is stored in the digital image. The color
images contain gray level information in each spectral band.
The images are represented as red, green and blue (RGB images). And each color image has
24 bits/pixel means 8 bits for each of the three color band(RGB).

8-bit color format: 8-bit color is used for storing image information in a computer's memory
or in a file of an image. In this format, each pixel represents one 8 bit byte. It has 0-255 range
of colors, in which 0 is used for black, 255 for white and 127 for gray color. The 8-bit color
format is also known as a grayscale image. Initially, it was used by the UNIX operating
system.

16-bit color format: The 16-bit color format is also known as high color format. It has
65,536 different color shades. It is used in the system developed by Microsoft. The 16-bit
color format is further divided into three formats which are Red, Green, and Blue also known
as RGB format.
In RGB format, there are 5 bits for R, 6 bits for G, and 5 bits for B. One additional bit is
added in green because in all the 3 colors green color is soothing to eyes.

24-bit color format: The 24-bit color format is also known as the true color format. The 24-
bit color format is also distributed in Red, Green, and Blue. As 24 can be equally divided on
8, so it is distributed equally between 3 different colors like 8 bits for R, 8 bits for G and 8
bits for B.

Image Sampling and Quantization

Concept of Sampling
 Unit 1 - Introduction and Digital Image Fundamentals

Sampling is done only on an independent variable. For example, if we digitize x-axis in

sampling.
y=sinx (it is done on variable x)

Sampling is divided into two parts: upsampling and downsampling

There are variations in the sampled signal which is due to noise. To reduce the noise more
samples are taken which means more data or pixel which result in a better image with less
noise present in it.
In an image, pixel is the smallest element which is represented in the form of a matrix.
In sampling, the number of samples taken in X-axis is continuous and refers to a number of
pixels in that image.

Quantization: Quantization is a lossy compression technique which is achieved by

compressing a range of values to single quantum. In other words, we can also say that it is a
process of converting a continuous range of values into a finite range of discrete values. In a
given stream when discrete symbols are reduced then, the stream becomes more
compressible.

For example, when we reduce the number of colors in a digital image the file size is also
reduced.
Applications such as DCT data quantization in JPEG and DWT data quantization in JPEG
2000 are used.
 Unit 1 - Introduction and Digital Image Fundamentals

As we know that bits are used to represent a pixel intensity, which is limited that is why
quantization is needed.

If 8 bit is used for a pixel which is in the range from 0 to 255 where 0 is used for pure black
and 255 is used for pure white and the intermediate values are used for gray color.

Applications of image processing:

 Interest in digital image processing methods stems from 2 principal application areas:
o (1) improvement of pictorial information for human interpretation
o (2) processing of scene data for autonomous machine perception.
 In the second application area, interest focuses on procedures for extracting image
information in a form suitable for computer processing.
 Examples include automatic character recognition, industrial machine vision for
product assembly and inspection, military recognisance, automatic processing of
fingerprints etc.

What's an image?
An image refers to a 2D light intensity function f(x,y), where (x,y) denote spatial coordinates
and the value of f at any point (x,y) is proportional to the brightness or gray levels of the
image at that point.
A digital image is an image f(x,y) that has been discretized both in spatial coordinates and
brightness. The elements of such a digital array are called image elements or pixels.

A simple image model: To be suitable for computer processing, an image f(x,y) must be
digitalized both spatially and in amplitude.
Digitization of the spatial coordinates (x,y) is called image sampling.
Amplitude digitization is called gray-level quantization.
The storage and processing requirements increase rapidly with the spatial resolution and the
number of gray levels.
Example: A 256 gray-level image of size 256x256 occupies 64K bytes of memory.
Images of very low spatial resolution produce a checkerboard effect.
The use of insufficient number of gray levels in smooth areas of a digital image results in
false contouring.
 Unit 1 - Introduction and Digital Image Fundamentals

Fundamental steps in image processing:

1. Image acquisition: to acquire a digital image
2. Image preprocessing: to improve the image in ways that increase the chances for
success of the other processes.
3. Image segmentation: to partition an input image into its constituent parts or objects.
4. Image representation: to convert the input data to a form suitable for computer
processing.
5. Image description: to extract features that result in some quantitative information of
interest or features that are basic for differentiating one class of objects from another.
6. Image recognition: to assign a label to an object based on the information provided
by its descriptors.
7. Image interpretation: to assign meaning to an ensemble of recognized objects.
Knowledge about a problem domain is coded into an image processing system in the
form of a knowledge database.