2.1 Introduction

An image is a 2D signal, typically a brightness function of two spatial variables. Common examples are photographs, still frames of video, radar and sonar images, and x-rays. A digital image results from a sampling of the spatial domain and a quantization of the brightness values. The sampling produces a finite 2D array of values uniformly distributed over the field of view, while the quantization restricts the sample values to a finite integer range. These necessary operations convert real-world analog sensory data to a form suitable for computer processing and storage.

The fundamentals of computer representation of image data are the primary focus of this chapter. Sections 2.2 and 2.3 present general concepts of grayscale and color image data formats, while Section 2.4 places emphasis on details concerning the Mathematica implementation of a suitable image data structure. This new Mathematica object is used throughout the Digital Image Processing package. The chapter concludes with Section 2.5 on reading, writing, displaying, and annotating images. This section introduces new image read and write functionality, and various methods of visualizing image data in particular, and 2D sampled signals in general.

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