ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book introduces image processing algorithms to extract useful ice information particularly the information of ice floe boundaries from small scale visible ice images in a systematic and objective way. It considers the ice parameters which include ice concentration, ice types, ice floe positions and areas, and floe size distribution. The estimation of ice floe size and floe size distribution among the "ice floes" gives an important set of parameters from ice images. In image processing, the ice floe size can be determined by the number of pixels in the identified floe. In most cases, human manual interpretation is simply impossible, and the only feasible solution for information extraction from images is through digital image processing by a computer. Digital image processing algorithms, implemented by computers, are important to replace humans in the interpretation of image data.
