Applied Geography

Spatial filtering encompasses another set of digital processing functions which are used to enhance the appearance of an image. Spatial filters are designed to highlight or suppress specific features in an image based on their spatial frequency. Spatial frequency is related to the concept of image texture. It refers to the frequency of the variations in tone that appear in an image. "Rough" textured areas of an image, where the changes in tone are abrupt over a small area, have high spatial frequencies, while "smooth" areas with little variation in tone over several pixels, have low spatial frequencies. A common filtering procedure involves moving a 'window' of a few pixels in dimension (e.g. 3x3, 5x5, etc.) over each pixel in the image, applying a mathematical calculation using the pixel values under that window, and replacing the central pixel with the new value. The window is moved along in both the row and column dimensions one pixel at a time and the ca

Grey level thresholding. Level slicing. Contrast stretching. Image enhancement Lillesand and Kiefer (1994) explained the goal of image enhancement procedures is to improve the visual interpretability of any image by increasing the apparent distinction between the features in the scene. This objective is to create "new" image from the original image in order to increase the amount of information that can be visually interpreted from the data. Enhancement operations are normally applied to image data after the appropriate restoration procedures have been performed. Noise removal, in particular, is an important precursor to most enhancements. In this study, typical image enhancement techniques are as follows: Grey level thresholding Grey level thresholding is a simple lookup table, which partitions the gray levels in an image into one or two categories - those below a user-selected threshold and those above. Thresholding is one of many methods for creating a binary mask for an i