TABLE OF CONTENTS The rapidly decreasing cost and increasing power of modern day computing devices have contributed to the prevalent use of digital images in recent years. Image processing systems that have found applications in everyday life include digital photography, electronic publishing, on-line museum, electronic catalog shopping, home surveillance, image rich souvenirs, and so on. A typical end-to-end image processing system typically includes input devices, processing devices, and output devices. Output devices are very important in imaging systems because they allow the image data to be presented to the user in a human observable form. Popular imaging output devices include image printers, video displays, liquid crystal displays, projection devices, and many others.
In practical applications, quantities in digital images are usually quantized to 8 bits. Specifically, we use 8 bits to represent the image pixel intensity (graylevel) for monochrome (grayscale) images, and use 24 bits to represent the combined red, green and blue intensity levels for color images (i.e., 8 bits for each color plane). Hence we have 256 graylevels for monochrome images and 16 million colors for color images. It has been demonstrated in practice that such a representation is normally sufficient to be considered "continuous tone."
Many image output devices share characteristics that lead to two common...
