Still images are the important element of a multimedia project or a web site. In order to make a multimedia presentation look elegant and complete, it is necessary to spend ample amount of time to design the graphics and the layouts. Competent, computer literate skills in graphic art and design are vital to the success of a multimedia project.
Digital Image
A digital image is represented by a matrix of numeric values each representing a quantized intensity value. When I is a two-dimensional matrix, then I(r,c) is the intensity value at the position corresponding to row r and column c of the matrix.
The points at which an image is sampled are known as picture elements, commonly abbreviated as pixels. The pixel values of intensity images are called gray scale levels (we encode here the “color” of the image). The intensity at each pixel is represented by an integer and is determined from the continuous image by averaging over a small neighborhood around the pixel location. If there are just two intensity values, for example, black, and white, they are represented by the numbers 0 and 1; such images are called binary-valued images. If 8-bit integers are used to store each pixel value, the gray levels range from 0 (black) to 255 (white).
Digital Image Format
There are different kinds of image formats in the literature. We shall consider the image format that comes out of an image frame grabber, i.e., the captured image format, and the format when images are stored, i.e., the stored image format.
Captured Image Format
The image format is specified by two main parameters: spatial resolution, which is specified as pixels x pixels (eg. 640x480)and color encoding, which is specified by bits per pixel. Both parameter values depend on hardware and software for input/output of images.
Stored Image Format
When we store an image, we are storing a two-dimensional array of values, in which each value represents the data associated with a pixel in the image. For a bitmap, this value is a binary digit.
