Image processing has been with us a long time even to prehistory with the hunters decorating pieces of bone, rock or cave walls with depictions of what they see of their world about them. The images were often stylised to indicate status, where game could be found and other information. This was the first image processing to manipulate images for whatever reason. It wasnt until photography in the 19th century that manipulating images to provide montages, colouring and cutting out inconvenient features became common.With the advent of large scale practical computing in the last quarter of 20th Century, scanning of images into digital form came into use shortly followed by processing software. Such early software was designed to manipulate images for a wide range of early applications including optical character recognition (OCR) such as Textbridge, enhancing and manipulating digitised images such as Adobes Photoshop and compressing of images into smaller file sizes such as PDF creator. With the arrival of digital photography, gigabytes and even terrabytes of computer memory on a microchip, vastly improved commuter processing power and graphics interfaces, in the 1990s and into the 21st Century, the applications have mushroomed into all corners of our lives and changed western society for ever.Orbiting satellites now use image acquisition techniques to photograph the whole Earth in infra-red, ultra-violet, visible spectrum light and x-rays and these images are processed to show features and resources never dreamed possible only 60 years ago. Digital imagery has now matured and modern films such as Avatar attest to this fact.One application of image processing, which has been with us from the start of computer imaging but has not yet reached anything like its full potential, is OCR. Many will remember the early Textbridge applications that used scanned digital images which proved to be more trouble than it was worth. Equal sized scripts on the l evel were no problem but poor images and cursive script are still a problem with typically less than 80% accuracy and formatting hang ups. Copy typing lives on for the time being and somebody will clean up if a truly accurate OCR package is launched onto a frustrated office world./">Image processing software is used very much in crime fighting and security applications. You will all have seen and heard of Photofit which was an early means to prepare to automate facial images of wanted suspects. This used a book of different types of facial features from which the witness from the crime scene could choose and for the specialist policemen to assemble into a Photofit image. Success rate of apprehension of criminals from this method were small and these days, a completely digitised suite of programmes are available call E-Fit. A more recent form of software using modern computing power is the automated number plate recognition (ANPR) system that uses image acquisition to read th e plates using the traffic cops digital video camera and links it in real time to their centralised Criminal Records Bureaus, DVLAs and insurance industrys databases to flag up wrongdoing associated with the vehicle in milliseconds.In addition to the many security systems and smart camera devices using image processing software, by far the biggest user of such software is for office use in general and for graphical design in particular. These days, near professional standard image manipulation is well within the grasp of the average computer competent office worker with the wide range of imaging software available such as Microsofts Photodraw, and the shareware package GIMP. However, for professional use, Apples Aperture and Lightbox imaging software packages holds sway.It doesnt stop there with specialised applications for industry, military, communications and the entertainment being just a few areas of interest using imaging software.
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