Image is everything

Image analysis covers a lot of territory, these days. From astronomy to microbiology, if there is a field of study which remains immune then I haven’t found it. Some of the glamorously obvious applications which it underpins are in biometrics, where it is used in fingerprint readers and facial recognition systems touched upon in last year’s pattern recognition article, but it is just as important to the routine application of science. Many of the medical, climatological and military visualisation examples which I quoted in the last issue have image analysis as their raison d’être. [more...]