Computer Vision for Busy Developers
Image Processing
This article is part of a series introducing developers to Computer Vision. Check out other articles in this series.
Getting Started with Images
Before we dive deeper into computer vision, let’s first go over some basics of Images and simple image processing. So, what’s a digital image? To simplify, an image is an array of numerical values called pixels. Images are generally organized in two dimensions with the array starting at the top-left where the index is 0 and flows from left-to-right and top-to-bottom. In a color image, each pixel represents a color made up of three distinct numerical values. These distinct numerical values represent the intensity of Red, Green and Blue light. The combination of these three intensity values gives each pixel its color. Often times, we want to focus on a specific color channel, which is all of the values of a single intensity in isolation. In any individual pixel, an intensity of 0 indicates no light in that channel for that pixel and an intensity of 255 indicates the maximum light in the channel for that pixel (assuming each channel is represented by one byte, resulting in three bytes per pixel).
SIDE NOTE: In academic papers, digital images are often represented by a mathematical function. The function takes in an X and a…
