In the broadest sense, image processing includes any form of information processing in which the input is an image. Many image processing techniques derive from the application of signal processing techniques to the domain of images — two-dimensional signals such as photographs or video. Signal processing is the processing, amplification and interpretation of signals. ... Image of the Wikimedia Commons logo. ... Signaling, or a signal, may mean: Look up signal in Wiktionary, the free dictionary Scientific concepts In information theory, a signal is a flow of information that can be represented as a mathematical function. ... Lens and mounting of a large format camera Photography is the process of making pictures by means of the action of light. ... Video (from Latin, I see) is the technology of processing electronic signals for representing moving pictures. ...

Most of the signal processing concepts that apply to one-dimensional signals — such as resolution, dynamic range, bandwidth, filtering, etc. — extend naturally to images as well. However, image processing brings some new concepts — such as connectivity and rotational invariance — that are meaningful or useful only for two-dimensional signals. Also, certain one-dimensional concepts — such as differential operators, edge detection, and domain modulation — become substantially more complicated when extended to two dimensions. The image resolution is a term that says something about how much image detail an image can hold. ... Dynamic range is a term used frequently in numerous fields to describe the ratio between the smallest and largest possible values of a changeable quantity. ... // Analog For analog signals, bandwidth is the width, usually measured in hertz, of a frequency band f2 − f1. ... In electronics and signal processing, a filter is a device or process that modifies a signal. ... The term connection has various uses, including: An act of connecting two or more physical entities in a physical sense or connecting concepts in memory or imagination, see below Telecommunications circuit switching That which connects, relates or joins: An electrical connection A telecommunication circuit such as a fiber-optic connection... In mathematics, a function defined on an inner product space is said to have rotational invariance if its value does not change when arbitrary rotations are applied to its argument. ... In mathematics, a differential operator is a linear operator defined as a function of the differentiation operator. ... The goal of edge detection is to mark the points in an image at which the intensity changes sharply. ...

The name image processing is most appropriate when both inputs and outputs are images. The extraction of arbitrary information from images is the domain of image analysis, which includes pattern recognition when the patterns to be identified are in images. In computer vision one seeks to extract more abstract information, such as the 3D description of a scene from video footage of it. The tools and concepts of image processing are also relevant to image synthesis from more abstract models, which is a major branch of computer graphics. Image analysis is the extraction of useful information from images; mainly from digital images by means of digital image processing techniques. ... For the William Gibson novel, see: Pattern Recognition (novel). ... Computer vision is a subfield of artificial intelligence. ... Image synthesis is the process where any set of elements are obtained/concocted from any number of sources and integrated into a composition. ... Computer graphics (CG) is the field of visual computing, where one utilizes computers both to generate visual images synthetically and to integrate or alter visual and spatial information sampled from the real world. ...

The enormous size of images, compared to other data streams commonly processed by computers, and the need to process images quickly, has led to whole sub-fields on high speed image processing. A few decades ago, image processing was done largely in the analog domain, chiefly by optical devices. Optical methods are inherently parallel, and for that reason they are still essential to holography and a few other applications. However, as computers keep getting faster, analog techniques are being increasingly replaced by digital image processing techniques — which are more versatile, reliable, accurate, and easier to implement. Specialized hardware is still used for digital image processing: computer architectures based on pipelining have been the most commercially successful, but many different massively parallel architectures were developed as well. These architectures, especially pipelined architectures, are still commonly used in video processing systems. However, these days commercial image processing tasks with a processing speed of a few images per second or less are increasingly done by software libraries running on conventional personal computers. An analog or analogue signal is any continuously variable signal. ... See also list of optical topics. ... The term Parallel has a number of important meanings: Parallel (geometry) occurs in geometry. ... Holography (from the Greek, Όλος-holos whole + γραφή-graphe writing) is the science of producing holograms, an advanced form of photography that allows an image to be recorded in three dimensions. ... The tower of a personal computer. ... Digital image processing is the use of algorithms to perform image processing on digital images. ... A massively parallel is a distributed memory computer system which consists of many individual nodes, each of which is essentially an independent computer in itself, and in turn consists of at least one processor, its own memory, and a link to the network that connects all the nodes together. ...

Typical problems covered by this field include

• Geometric transformations such as enlargement, reduction, and rotation;
• Color corrections such as brightness and contrast adjustments, quantization, or conversion to a different color space;
• Combination of two or more images, e.g. into an average, blend, difference, or image composite.
• Interpolation, demosaicing, and recovery of a full image from a mosaic image (e.g. a Bayer pattern, etc.);
• Noise reduction and other types of filtering, and signal averaging;
• Edge detection and other local operators;
• Segmentation of the image into regions;
• image editing and digital retouching;
• Extending dynamic range by combining differently exposed images (generalized signal averaging of Wyckoff sets).

and many more. In mathematics, Euclidean geometry is the familiar kind of geometry on the plane or in three dimensions. ... Color is an important part of the visual arts. ... Quantization of x using Q(x) = floor(Lx)/L. In digital signal processing, quantization is the process of approximating a continuous signal by a set of discrete symbols or integer values; that is, converting an analog signal to a digital one via analog-to-digital conversion. ... A color model is an abstract mathematical model describing the way colors can be represented as tuples of numbers, typically as three or four values or color components (e. ... This article needs to be wikified. ... The Bayer pattern mosaic. ... Noise reduction is the process of removing noise from a signal. ... An FIR filter In electronics, a digital filter is any electronic filter that works by performing digital math operations on an intermediate form of a signal. ... The goal of edge detection is to mark the points in an image at which the intensity changes sharply. ... In mathematics, an operator is some kind of function; if it comes with a specified type of operand as function domain, it is no more than another way of talking of functions of a given type. ... In image analysis, segmentation is the partition of a digital image into multiple regions (sets of pixels), according to some criterion. ... 2D computer graphics is the computer-based generation of digital images—mostly from two-dimensional models (such as 2D geometric models, text, and digital images) and by techniques specific to them. ... In many cases only one image with noise is available, and averaging is then realized in a local neighbourhood. ...

Besides static two-dimensional images, the field also covers the processing of time-varying signals such as video and the output of tomographic equipment. Some techniques, such as morphological image processing, are specific to binary or grayscale images. Video (from Latin, I see) is the technology of processing electronic signals for representing moving pictures. ... Tomography is imaging by sections or sectioning. ... A collection of techniques for digital image processing based on mathematical morphology. ... A binary image is a digital image that has only two possible values for each pixel. ... In computing, a grayscale or greyscale digital image is an image in which the value of each pixel is a single sample. ...

Some applications are:

• Photography and printing
• Satellite image processing
• Medical image processing
• Face detection, feature detection, face identification
• Microscope image processing

Some related concepts are: Lens and mounting of a large format camera Photography is the process of making pictures by means of the action of light. ... Medical imaging is the process by which physicians evaluate an area of the subjects body that is not normally visible. ... Face detection is a computer technology that identifies human faces in arbitrary images. ... Microscope image processing is a broad term that covers the use of digital image processing techniques to process, analyze and present images obtained from a microscope. ...

• Classification
• Feature extraction
• Pattern recognition
• Projection
• Multi-scale signal analysis
• Principal components analysis
• Independent component analysis
• Self organizing map
• Hidden Markov model
• Neural networks

Classification may refer to: Taxonomic classification See also class (philosophy) Statistical classification Hint: Language use may refer to a taxonomic classification that is used for statistical purposes also as a statistical classification (like International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems). ... Feature extraction is an area of image processing which involves using algorithms to detect and isolate various desired portions of a digitized image or video stream. ... For the William Gibson novel, see: Pattern Recognition (novel). ... The word projection can mean more than one thing. ... In statistics, principal components analysis (PCA) is a technique that can be used to simplify a dataset; more formally it is a linear transformation that chooses a new coordinate system for the data set such that the greatest variance by any projection of the data set comes to lie on... Independent component analysis (ICA) is a computational method for separating a multivariate signal into additive subcomponents supposing the mutual statistical independence of the non-Gaussian source signals. ... The self-organising map (SOM) is a method for unsupervised learning, based on a grid of artificial neurons whose weights are adapted to match input vectors in a training set. ... A hidden Markov model (HMM) is a statistical model where the system being modelled is assumed to be a Markov process with unknown parameters, and the challenge is to determine the hidden parameters, from the observable parameters, based on this assumption. ... A neural network is an interconnected group of neurons. ...

See also

• Digital image processing
• Computer graphics
• Computer vision
• GPGPU
• optics
• photography
• imaging
• digitizing
• super-resolution

Digital image processing is the use of algorithms to perform image processing on digital images. ... Computer graphics (CG) is the field of visual computing, where one utilizes computers both to generate visual images synthetically and to integrate or alter visual and spatial information sampled from the real world. ... Computer vision is a subfield of artificial intelligence. ... General-Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing Units (also referred to as GPGP and to a lesser extent GP^2) is a recent trend in computer science that uses the graphics processing unit to perform the computations rather than the CPU. Game programmers have had the need to make more realistic... See also list of optical topics. ... Lens and mounting of a large format camera Photography is the process of making pictures by means of the action of light. ... Imaging refers to the science of obtaining pictures or more complicated spatial representations, such as animations or 3-D computer graphics models, from physical things. ... Digitizing, or digitization, is the process of turning an analog signal into a digital representation of that signal. ... Super-resolution (SR) are techniques that in some way enhance the resolution of an imaging system. ...

External links

• Image Processing Algorithms
• Hypermedia Image Processing Reference
• manual image processing with GPL software Gimp
• EMVA - European Machine Vision Association
• Software for Image Processing and Machine Vision
• Wikicities has a wiki about Image processing: Computer Vision