A Tutorial on Image Analysis

Data arise in the form of images in many different areas and using many different technologies. Within medical diagnostics, X-rays are probably the most well-known form of direct imaging, gathering structural information about the body by recording the transmission of X-rays. More recent advances have been the various emission-based technologies, PET and SPECT, which aim to map metabolic activity in the body, and MRI (Figure 3.1c) which again provides structural information. On two quite different scales, satellites (Figure 3.1a and b) and microscopes (Figure 3.1d) monitor and record useful scientific information; for example, aerial imaging in different wavebands and at different stages in the growing season can be used to detect crop subsidy fraud, while some types of microscopy can be used to generate temporal sequences of three dimensional images, leading to a greater understanding of biological processes. There is an expectation that technological advances should soon provide solutions to problems such as automatic face or hand recognition, or unsupervised robotic vision.