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Step 1: Image Acquisition

The image is captured by a sensor (eg. Camera), and digitized if the output of the
camera or sensor is not already in digital form, using analogue-to-digital convertor
Types: Gamma rays imaging, X ray imaging, Microscopy images, Satellite images, Radar
images, MRI images, Acoustic images, Electron microscopy, Synthetic (computer
generated images
Step 2: Image Enhancement
Image enhancement refers to the accentuation of sharpening of image features such
as edges, boundaries, or contrast to make a graphic display more useful for display and
analysis.
The principal objectives of enhancement process are
to increase the dynamic range of the chosen features so that they can be detected
easily to effectively display the data for subsequent visual interpretation. (e.g., satellite
pictures)
to improve the quality of an image as perceived by a human.
to give output which is more suitable than the original image for a specific
applications.

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Image enhancement approaches fall into two broad categories

1. spatial domain methods
2. frequency domain methods

The term spatial domain refers to the image plane itself and techniques used in this
category are based on direct manipulation of pixels in an image. Frequency domain
techniques are based on modifying the Fourier transform of an image
Step 3: Image Restoration
It is the process of recovering an image that has been degraded by using some priori
knowledge of the degradation phenomenon. Image restoration concerns the removal or
reduction of degradations which have occurred during the acquisition of the image.

Such degradations may include

- noise, which are errors in the pixel values
- optical effects such as out of focus, blurring
- blurring due to camera motion/misfocus
- random atmospheric turbulence
The aim of restoration process is to improve the appearance of an image.

Step 4: Colour Image Processing

This processing handles the image processing of coloured images either as indiexed
images or RGB images.
The human visual system can distinguish hundreds of thousands of different colour
shades and intensities, but only around 100 shades of grey.
Therefore, in an image, a great deal of extra information may be contained in the
colour, and this extra information can then be used to simplify image analysis, e.g. object
identification and extraction based on colour.
Step 5: Wavelets and multi-resolution processing
In Fourier transform, the basis functions are sinusoids, hence localized in frequency but
not localized in time and there is a loss in temporal information in transform domain.
Wavelet transforms are based on small waves, called wavelets of varying frequency and
limited duration. It reveals both the frequency & temporal information in the transform
domain.
Wavelets leads to multi-resolution processing in which images are represented in
various degrees of resolution.

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Step 6: Image compression

Image compression is defined as the process of reducing the amount of data
needed to represent a digital Image. This is done by removing the redundant data.
The objective of image compression is to decrease the number of bits required to
store and transmit images without any measurable loss of information.
Need for compression
To reduce the volume of data to be transmitted (text, fax, images)
To reduce the bandwidth required for transmission and to reduce storage requirements
(speech, audio, video)
Aim to remove redundancy present in data in a way which makes image reconstruction
possible.
Transform a 2-D array into a statistically uncorrelated data set.
Step 7: Morphological Processing
• Binary images may contain numerous imperfections.
• In particular, the binary regions produced by simple thresholding are distorted by
noise and texture.
• Morphological image processing pursues the goals of removing these
imperfections by accounting for the form and structure of the image. These
techniques can be extended to greyscale images.
Morphological operations rely only on the relative ordering of pixel values, not on their
numerical values, and therefore are especially suited to the processing of binary images
Step 8: Segmentation
• Image segmentation is the division of an image into regions or categories,
which correspond to different objects or parts of objects.
• Every pixel in an image is allocated to one of a number of these categories.
A good segmentation is typically one in which:
• pixels in the same category have similar greyscale of multivariate values and
form a connected region
• neighbouring pixels which are in different categories have dissimilar values.
Thresholding is the simplest and most commonly used method of segmentation

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Step 9: Representation & Description

This step always follow the output of a segmentation stage
• After an image is segmented into regions, each region is represented and
described in a form suitable for further computer processing.
• Basically, there are two ways of representation.
• The external or boundary representation is used when the primary focus is
on exteral shape characteristics.,

• The internal or regional representation is used when the primary focus is on

regional properties such as texture or skeleton shape
Description, also called feature selection deals with extracting attributes that results in
quantitative information.
Step 10: Object Recognition
• Object recognition is a computer vision technique for identifying objects in
images or videos.
• Object recognition is a key output of deep learning and machine learning
algorithms.
• When humans look at a photograph or watch a video, we can readily spot
people, objects, scenes, and visual details. The goal is to teach a computer to do
what comes naturally to humans: to gain a level of understanding of what an
image contains.
You can use a variety of approaches for object recognition.
Recently, techniques in machine learning and deep learning have become popular
approaches to object recognition problems. Both techniques learn to identify objects in
images, but they differ in their execution.
Knowledge Base
Knowledge base helps for efficient processing as well as inter module cooperation
Knowledge about a problem domain is coded into an image processing system.
Knowledge base guides the operation of each processing module.
Knowledge base controls the interaction between modules