Digital Image Processing

You know the scenes in thrillers where the government security experts behind the scenes look at grainy video camera footage and enhance it digitally?

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Those used to always strike me as far-fetched. Simply put, you cannot put information into a picture that is not already there. I was quite sure that it was impossible, simply a figment of Hollywood's imagination. That is before I discovered digital image processing.

Digital imaging has been around for a long time, of course. I can still remember when I was a teenager and used to fool around with Photoshop. I had a copy of Adobe Photoshop that I had burned from a friend, and I would use it to tinker with pictures that I would scan into the computer. I could do all kinds of things, from rearranging people's heads to changing the colors in the picture. Although it seemed pretty neat and high-tech to me at the time, compared to what is around today it was only basic image processing.

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Things have gone much further than that.

You see, image detection and manipulation are key to many different industries. Nowadays, even digital cameras have simple digital image processing programs in them, but the applications get much more sophisticated than that. Hollywood makes use of video image processing, allowing them to replace high-tech and expensive special effects with computer graphics. The government makes use of digital image processing, allowing it to look for facial characteristics of known criminals among thousands and thousands of hours of videotape. Digital processing image has even found a place in artificial intelligence. Image recognition is key to the creation of a working, functioning robot that is able to interact in real-world environments. The same technology that was pioneered for Hollywood is now an aide to the researchers working in image detection.

One of the neat things about digital image processing and about technology as a whole is that the rapid explosion in computer technology has made some of the most sophisticated programs out there available to regular users like you and me. Don't get me wrong, it takes a lot of knowledge to use some of these things. Nonetheless, photo manipulation is available to everyone, digital animation technology is available to anyone who wants to pay for it, and even artificial intelligence programming is possible if you are willing to learn the programming and math behind it. Through digital image processing, we can make the world more vivid to ourselves, and more recognizable to our robot helpers.

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