TABLE OF CONTENTS This chapter, and the two that follow, describe the most commonly used and most basic tools for digital image processing. For many simple image analysis tasks, such as contrast enhancement, noise removal, object location, and frequency analysis, much of the necessary collection of instruments can be found in chapters 2.1-2.3. Moreover, these chapters supply the basic groundwork that is needed for the more extensive developments that are given in the subsequent chapters of the Handbook.
In the current chapter, we study basic gray-level digital image processing operations. The types of operations studied fall into three classes.
The first are point operations, or image processing operations that are applied to individual pixels only. Thus, interactions and dependencies between neighboring pixels are not considered, nor are operations that consider multiple pixels simultaneously to determine an output. Since spatial information, such as a pixel's location and the values of its neighbors are not considered, point operations are defined as functions of pixel intensity only. The basic tool for understanding, analyzing, and designing image point operations is the image histogram, which will be introduced below.
The second class includes arithmetic operations between images of the same spatial dimensions. These are also point operations in the sense that spatial information is not considered, although...
