Chapter 2
Image Processing Basics
What Will We Learn?
- How is a digital image represented and stored in memory?
- What are the main types of digital image representation?
- What are the most popular image file formats?
- What are the most common types of image processing operations and how do they affect pixel values?
2.1 Digital Image Representation
A digital image—whether it was obtained as a result of sampling and quantization of an analog image or created already in digital form—can be represented as a two-dimensional (2D) matrix of real numbers. In this book, we adopt the convention f(x, y) to refer to monochrome images of size M×N, where x denotes the row number (from 0 to 
) and y represents the column number (between 0 and 
) (Figure 2.1):
Figure 2.1 A monochrome image and the convention used to represent rows (x) and columns (y) adopted in this book.
The value of the two-dimensional function 
at any given pixel of coordinates , denoted by , is called the intensity or gray level ...
