Cleaning images

While image processing is a complex task, we will introduce a few techniques to clean and extract information from an image. This will provide the reader with some insight into image processing. We will also demonstrate how to extract text data from an image using Optical Character Recognition (OCR).

There are several techniques used to improve the quality of an image. Many of these require tweaking of parameters to get the improvement desired. We will demonstrate how to:

• Enhance an image's contrast

• Smooth an image

• Brighten an image

• Resize an image

• Convert images to different formats

We will use OpenCV (http://opencv.org/), an open source project for image processing. There are several classes that we will use:

• Mat: This represents an n-dimensional array holding image data such as channel, grayscale, or color values

• Imgproc: Possesses many methods that process an image

• Imgcodecs: Possesses methods to read and write image files

The OpenCV Javadocs is found at http://docs.opencv.org...