1.4 The Challenge
At this point we are left with the following situation. The object of interest is the
specimen that is placed under the microscope. The instrument forms an optical
image that represents that specimen. We assume that the optical image is well
represented by a continuous image (which is an analytic function), and we strive,
through the choices available in microscopy, to make this be the case. Further,
the optical image is sampled and quantized in such a way that the information
relevant to the problem at hand has been retained in the digital image. We can
interpolate the digital image to produce an approximation to the continuous
image or to make it visible for interpretation. We must now process the digital
image, either to extract ...