Explaining image analysis terms

Morphology, segmentation and classification: three long words that don’t mean a lot to the machine vision newbie. Yet it’s worth taking some time to learn what they mean, and more importantly, what they can do for you.

I could sit down and write a primer for you, but since Ben Dawson of Teledyne Dalsa has already written such a piece I shall save myself the time. Instead, allow me to direct you to “Image Analysis: Image Analysis for Product Quality”, published in the Vision & sensors supplement to Quality magazine, March 2012.

This will not turn you in to an image processing guru, but will provide an introduction to terms such as erosion and dilation. These are ways of cleaning up images and making them easier to work with, so I encourage you to learn more about them.

But theory alone is not enough: to understand what these tools do you need to use them. If you have image processing software available, great, use it to experiment. If not, do as Ben suggests and download a very neat image processing tool called ImageJ. It’s extremely capable, and best of all, it’s free!