This chapter included several useful techniques to manipulate the values of grayscale image pixels. At the same time, it provided a first, hopefully gentle, introduction to writing and running your own scripts and functions in MATLAB. More specifically, you have been taught:
How to change pixel values in a rectangular area using for loops, or indexing
How to write and execute a script that alters the brightness in specified rectangular areas of an image
How to threshold an image using for loops
How to threshold an image using indexing
How to threshold an image using im2bw
How to perform thresholding using an automatically derived threshold
How to calculate and display the histogram of a grayscale image
How to perform histogram equalization using histeq
How to perform contrast enhancement using imadjust
How to perform contrast enhancement using imcontrast
How to perform adaptive histogram equalization using adapthisteq
How to write functions that use all the methods described in this chapter on practical examples
The next chapter will introduce you to morphological operations and their importance in image processing. Some methods already presented will be combined with the morphological operations to enhance images, or segment useful areas. Once finishing it, you will be able to perform extremely useful tasks that are applied both in computational photography and in machine vision applications.