Image Processing

The general intention of image processing is to manipulate digitized images in order to

• optimize the image appearance
• retrieve a maximum of information from an image
• perform Fourier filtering
• measure and control the quality of TEM images and of microscope performance
• measure properties like particle sizes and their distribution.

Besides simple operations, like optimizing brightness and contrast, two main strategies are applied:

1. replacing all pixels in an image by convoluted ones that systematically take their neighbourhood into account
2. processing images in frequency space.

Several of these operations are usually implemented in commercially available programs for image handling. A list of links and of programs that are especially useful for electron microscopy are the following.

Software:
external page Digital Micrograph^® (Gatan): commercial product; demo version available

external page ImageJ (National Institute of Health): public domain software; needs Java. A semi-automatic determination of particle size distributions is possible with ImageJ.

Link:
external page Digital image processing (Wikipedia)