ABSTRACT
Creating hard-copy representations of images, for example to use as illustrations in re-ports and publications, is important to many users of image processing equipment. It is also usually important to store the images so that they can be retrieved later, for instance to compare with new ones or to transmit to another worker. Both of these activities are necessary because it is rarely possible to reduce an image to a compact verbal description or a series of measurements that will communicate to someone else what we see or believe to be important in the image. In fact, it is often difficult to draw someone else’s attention to the particular details or general structure that may be present in an image that we may feel are the significant characteristics present, based on our examination of that image and many more. Faced with the inability to find descriptive words or numbers, we resort to passing a representation of the image on, perhaps with some annotation.
