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Images have become ubiquitous part in our everyday life and culture. The application of images have become very much essential for the advancement of different fields ranging from science and technology, to biomedical research and clinical practice, to commerce and industry, to entertainment and advertising, and to communication and education and so forth. Imaging science is an interdisciplinary field which requires knowledge of the disciplines of physics, engineering, chemistry, biology, and medicine. The rapid advances in imaging technology and techniques have led to the ever increasing growth of this field of study. It mainly deals with the detection, spatiotemporal localization, recording, display, visual observation, and measurement of object properties from images that are obtained from various imaging modalities. Properties of various objects of interests are studied by means of computerbased imaging systems that provide information needed for an understanding of their structure and functions. The main goal of imaging science is to develop an imaging system to yield images that are: 1. more accurate representations of objects, by reducing blurring, distortions, and other artifacts. 2. more reproducible, by reducing random fluctuations or noise without increasing observation time. 3. complete, by producing three-dimensional images of three-dimensional objects, and by increasing the number of object properties that can be imaged. 4. intelligent, by rendering and displaying them in a manner that makes the extraction, interpretation, and assimilation of information more accurate and reproducible. Subfields within imaging science include: image processing, 3D computer graphics, animations, atmospheric optics, astronomical imaging, digital imaging, color science, digital photography, holography, magnetic resonance imaging, optics, remote sensing, radar imaging, radiometry, ultrasound imaging, thermal imaging, visual perception, and various printing technologies.
b) X-Ray imaging -Direct, screen-film, CT, etc. c) Magnetic resonance imaging -Conventional and spectroscopic d) Radionuclide imaging -Positron Emission Tomography (PET), Single photon emission computerized (SPECT) tomography e) Ultrasound -Material testing, biomedical f) Holography & pseudo-holography -Light, X-ray, gamma ray g) Telescopic imaging -X-ray, UV, Optical, Infra red, radio h) Computer generated -Image simulation/animation from mathematical models i) Graphic arts & sciences Drawing, etching, painting, photography/video, printing, television j) Computer vision -CCD arrays/robotics
and/or follow up the treatment after detection or studying the cardiac activity from a sequence of cardiac echo images. 2. Computer Vision: Humans are naturally able to recognize the objects in a scene much better than computers. We can effortlessly distinguish among a remarkable variety of objects, actions and interactions even in complex, cluttered scenes, e.g., recognizing a particular face in a crowd. In contrast, automatically interpreting such scenes using a computer is very difficult. The challenge here is to develop fully automatic computer vision algorithms for the interpretation of complex scenes. Examples: segmenting and tracking of moving objects in a video, recognizing dynamic textures (water, smoke, fire) in a video, recognizing human activities in a video, and modeling and recognizing skill in surgical motion and video data. 3. Computational Biology: A formidable challenge is the dissection of gene regulatory networks to show how eukaryotic cells coordinate and govern patterns of gene expression. Here the imaging scientist might develop graphical models to capture the statistical dependency structure among gene and protein expression values. The future of imaging science is very bright and challenging. We are already into the era of ubiquitous imaging, where imaging is everywhere yet unobtrusive. This is paralleled to the concept of ubiquitous computing where everything is intelligent and connected. There is a plenty of research scopes, in various domains including the machine vision, the biomedical imaging and analysis, and the digital imaging. Problems in machine vision, such as the automatic interpretation of shapes and other objects appearing in images, MR perfusion for assessing early solid tumor response to therapy, Diffusion Tensor Imaging with MR to delineate important nerve tracts in relation to brain tumors, etc. are some of the ongoing active research problems.
[ Some of the contents of this article are written based on the paper that was presented at a colloquium entitled "Images of Science: Science of Images," organized by Albert V. Crewe, held January 13 and 14, 1992, at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC. ]