Image processing

Abstract

The word "Image"-the representation of a person or object-sounds dry, ikonish, and slightly technical; it has a broader meaning than "Picture" which sounds warmer and seems to have artistic overtones."Image Processing" sounds as if various operations are in process, while the word "Management" in association with "Image", or "Picture", implies organisation or control.All these terms are in use in the "Electronic Image" context.I will settle for "Image Processing" as encompassing all of them.A number of articles about the subject are brought together in this special issue.Image processing is usually brought to our attention in two ways-first, in connection with the huge amount of research on image recognition for vision systems in robotics, or for military purposes, and second, by the presence of images on computer screens, in advertisements, in technical articles, at exhibitions, or even (at the time of writing) on enormous TV screens stuck into the snow at the end of ski-jumps.Less expensive ways of scanning, digitizing, manipulating, storing, compressing, enhancing, and reproducing images in colour have been discovered and they can all be offered in a microcomputer system at a price which tempts us to have a go-after all a picture is supposed to be worth a thousand words.But for what purposes are images used?By and large, image applications are technology driven.An intensive sales campaign has been in progress for some time mainly because new waves of hype are essential to sustain microcomputer gizmo growth.There are many offerings in the form of plug-in cards and software for microcomputers such as genlock, frame-capture, graphics processing, motion-video, and go-faster cards.They are being purchased mainly by military researchers, computer buffs, multimedia experimenters, and medics.Several articles about multimedia-an obvious field for images-are included in this issue, although it is still a field of prospects rather than achievements (see Williams et al.).Another highly specialised but important new field is PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication Systems)-the provision for rapidly supplying images acquired radiologically to those who need patient data.