1. Image data representation

1.1 Image processing objective

Since Nicéphore Niépce took his first photograph in 1827, image acquisition and manipulation techniques have continued to advance.

Images are created by fixing radiation (in the broadest sense of the term) from an observed scene onto a medium: visible light for photography, X-rays for scanners, ultrasound for radar and ultrasound scans, infrared for thermography, and so on. Digitizing this information involves identical processes:

• observation of the scene,

• scene discretization, also known as sampling,

• discretization of perceived intensity, also known as quantization of information.

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