Digital Image Analysis

Visualization is defined as any technique for creating images, diagrams or animations to communicate a message. Visualization through visual imagery has been an effective means of communicating both abstract and concrete ideas since the dawn of man. There is great interest in quantifying the various aspects of structure, and in many cases, this involves imaging the structure and performing measurements on the images by image processing and analysis. The images may be simple macroscopic or microscopic light images, including confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM), but may also include images from either transmission or scanning electron microscopes (TEM and SEM), atomic force microscope (AFM) images of surfaces, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or computed tomography (CT) images of internal structure. The topics covered are the acquisition and processing of the images, the measurement of appropriate microstructural parameters, and the interpretation of these numbers, particularly with regard to the issues that the structures are generally three-dimensional while the images are usually two-dimensional. I hope that this article is able to usefully summarize the basic procedures, and that it will be of use to researchers in food science fields.