Chapter 15
What is an image processing task?
Image processing is the task of analyzing and manipulating digital image files to create new versions of the images, or to extract important data from them.
What is the smallest unit of digital imaging? How is it represented in computers?
The smallest unit of digital imaging is a pixel, which typically contains an RGB value: a tuple of integers between 0 and 255.
What is grayscaling? What purpose does the technique serve?
Grayscaling is the process of converting an image to gray colors by considering only the intensity information of each pixel, represented by the amount of light available. It reduces the dimensionality of the image pixel matrix by mapping traditional three-dimensional color data to one-dimensional gray data.
What is thresholding? What purpose does the technique serve?
Thresholding replaces each pixel in an image with a white pixel if the pixel's intensity is greater than a previously specified threshold, and with a black pixel if the pixel's intensity is less than that threshold. After performing thresholding on an image, each pixel of that image can only hold two possible values, significantly reducing the complexity of image data.
Why should image processing be made concurrent?
Heavy computational number-crunching processes are typically involved when it comes to image processing, as each image is a matrix of integer tuples. However, these processes can be executed independently, which suggests that the whole task should be made concurrent.
What are some good practices for concurrent image processing?
Some good practices for concurrent image processing are as follows:
- Choosing the correct method (out of many)
- Spawning an appropriate amount of processes
- Processing input/output concurrently