About Book:

         Vision is the most powerful of the five human senses.  Visual information, conveyed in the form of images gives better impact than textual information.  The fields of digital image processing have grown tremendously over the past 30 years.  The growth of digital image processing has been fueled by technological advances in digital imaging, computer processors and mass storage devices.  Research and development of image processing technologies have advanced very rapidly in the past decade.  Digital image processing is concerned primarily with the extraction of useful information from images.  In this process, it also deals with 1) image representation, 2) enhancing the quality of an image, 3) restoration of the original image from its degraded version, and 4) compression of the large amount of data in the images for efficient archiving and retrieval.  Image-processing algorithms can be classified into three different categories.  At the lowest level, the algorithm deals directly with the raw pixel values (image denoising and edge detection are good examples).  In the middle level, the algorithm utilises low-level results for processes such as segmentation and edge linking.  At the highest level, the algorithm attempts to extract semantic information from those provided by the lower levels. Examples of high-level algorithms are handwriting recognition, face recognition and machine vision algorithms.  The objective of this book is to not only introduce different concepts of digital image processing to undergraduate and postgraduate students but also to serve as a handbook for practicing engineers.

        Simulation is an essential tool in any field related engineering techniques.  In this book, the image processing algorithms are simulated using MATLAB.  It has been the endeavour of the authors to present a large number of detailed worked examples to illustrate the various digital image-processing concepts.

Organisation of the Book

      This book contains twelve chapters. Chapter 1 gives an overview of the digital image-processing system.  The different elements of image-processing systems like image acquisition, image sampling, quantisation, image sensors, image scanners and image storage devices are covered in this chapter.  The highlight of this chapter is the discussion of the different types of image file formats in practice.