ABSTRACT
T he distinction between image processing, which has occupied most of the preceding chapters, and image analysis lies in the extraction of information from the image. As mentioned previously, image processing, like word processing (or food processing), is the science of rearrangement. Pixel values can be altered according to neighboring pixel brightnesses, or shifted to another place in the array by image warping, but the number of pixels is unchanged. So in word processing it is possible to cut and paste paragraphs, perform spellchecking, or alter type styles without reducing the volume of text. And food processing is also an effort at rearrangement of ingredients to produce a more palatable mixture, not to convert it to a list of those ingredients. Image analysis, by contrast, attempts to find those descriptive parameters, usually numeric, that succinctly represent the information of importance in the image.
