Digital Image Processing

Digital image processing is electronic data processing on a 2-D array of numbers. The array is a numeric representation of an image. An image processing system consists of a source of image data, a processing element and a destination for the processed results.

Steps and Tools:
After obtaining the digitized image by the process of digitization the image is sent for image processing. Image processing operations can be roughly divided into three major categories, Image Compression, Image Enhancement and Restoration, and Measurement Extraction.

Image Compression:
As a result of digitization of an average size document at a medium resolution and color depth, a huge file of average size of about 20-50MB is produced. The quality of such an image is high, but the transmission time, the computational burden and the hardware requirements are simply enormous. Also the bandwidth of the transmission line required to transmit the information would be very large. Thus image compression is necessary. Some of the major compression techniques which can be used when transmitting or storing digital images are GIF(Graphics Interchage Format), PNG(Portable Network Graphics), JBIG(Joint Bilevel Group) and JPEG(Joint Photographers Expert Group). Various new techniques are also being devised for quick transmission and efficient compression.

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