Ms. Parul Bansal, Assistant Professor, Electronics & Computer Engineering Department of Dronacharya College of Engineering, Gurgaon delivered a webinar entitled “Digital Image Processing Concepts and Techniques with MATLAB” on 4th August 2016. The webinar was conducted under Indo-US Collaboration for Engineering Education (IUCEE-USA) Virtual Academy.

The objective of the webinar was to discuss the aspects of MATLAB in image processing domain and thus to enhance the knowledge in respective field. 94 participants attended the webinar.

Digital Image Processing is a field which deals with the processing of images that are digital in nature with a digital computer. The motivation for image processing arises from the need of improving quality of the images for human perception, efficient storage and transmission and machine applications. MATLAB (Matrix Laboratory) offers flexibility and ease of documentation which allows for real-time image processing.

The webinar was divided into 3 sessions. In the first session an introduction to image processing, digital image, the need for image processing and the fundamental steps for digital image processing such as image acquisition, image restoration, image filtering & enhancement, compression, segmentation, object recognition, etc were explained.

In the next session, an introduction to MATLAB was discussed. The power that MATLAB brings to digital image processing is an extensive set of functions for processing multidimensional arrays and images being two-dimensional numerical arrays are a special case of it. MATLAB provides Image Processing Toolbox which is the collection of functions that extend the capability of the MATLAB numeric computing environment. GUI stands for Graphical user interface and it provides point-and-click control of software applications which eliminates the need to learn a language or type commands in order to run the application. User can build GUI in MATLAB using GUIDE (GUI development environment) which provides tools to design user interfaces for custom apps and contains controls such as menus, toolbars, buttons, and sliders.

The last session gave a practical demonstration of Image processing using GUI in MATLAB. The GUI was designed to process some basic and advanced operations in image processing. The operations such as loading the image, converting it to gray scale and black and white image, processing color image to separate red, green and blue channels in the image and complementing the image were demonstrated. Under advanced operations, edge detection and image compression were performed which are very important functions in image processing field. Edge detection is the process of identifying edges in an image to be used as a fundamental asset in image analysis and it involves locating areas with strong intensity contrasts. It reduces unnecessary information in the image while preserving the structure of the image and is used to recognize objects, boundaries and segmentation. Image compression using Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) was demonstrated and the terms like compression ratio and Q-factor were explained.

Digital Image processing finds applications in various fields like medical, remote sensing, industrial inspection, robot vision, pattern recognition and microscopic imaging.

The webinar session was followed by a questionnaire and the attendees put up several queries such as the latest version of MATLAB, how to write an image on disc, how to build a GUI in MATLAB, how to preserve edges in edge detection, the presence of hue, saturation and luminance in an image, etc.

The video recording for the webinar has been uploaded by IUCEE and the link for the same is: https://youtu.be/C3_UAA2mbBM.

Some Glimpses: