Primary Objective of Image Processing is to enhance the appearance of pictures / photographs (images)  using  digital computers.

E.g.: enlargement, reduction, rotation, Color corrections such as brightness and contrast adjustments, quantization, or color translation to a different color space, Digital compositing or optical compositing (combination of two or more images), etc.

Stages of image processing

The general stages of image processing can be flowcharted in an idealized pipeline-not all stages  need to be present and the middle two or three stages may be interlaced.

Stage 1: Image Acquisition
How do we get images?

• Synthesis: images created in a computer

              rendered from geometry

              painted

• Capture: images from the “real world”

             must be “captured” or digitized; turned into digital information instead of analog signal or printed                    media

             common methods include:

                digital camera, satellite data transmission, drum scanner, slide scanner, flatbed photo scanner ,                   video frame grabber/converter

• Combination: texture-mapped polygons

              the texture is essentially an image, and the polygons part of a model.