ABSTRACT
In any digital imaging system, whether it is a confocal microscope forming an image with a photomultiplier tube (PMT; Chapter 5) or a wide-Želd microscope using a CCD camera, we are always dealing with an image made up of individual points: pixels. Often we are also handling samples of a three-dimensional volume: voxels. This quantization has profound effects on our image and how we must treat it. Furthermore, each point (unlike a point in a photograph) can have only certain discrete values. In many cases, the number corresponding to one pixel is an 8-bit value, meaning that it is encoded by eight binary digits (0s and 1s) and can therefore have 1 of 28 (256) values; it must lie between 0 and 255.
