A secondary look at digital image processing 2005

A “Secondary” Look at Digital Image Processing Alasdair McAndrew [email protected] Anne Venables [email protected] School of Computer Science and Mathematics Victoria University of Technology PO Box 14428, Melbourne 8001, Victoria, Australia ABSTRACT For the past few years, we have run a highly successful activity teaching some elementary digital image processing to students at years 9 and 10 of secondary school. The activity inv olve s wo rking with a digital camera, taking, capturing and saving images, and exploring pixel values and their re- lationship to image brightness and colour. We also perform some elemen tary processin g task s: thre shold ing, cha nging spat ial reso luti on and quantiza tion . Students then have a brief introduction to spatial filtering, followed by some ex- ampl es: image blu rring and ed ge dete ction . The activity finish es with some binar y morph olog y . Giv en that digi tal image processing is usually offered only at the upper under- graduate or postgraduate level, we have demonstrated that it is quite possible to introduce some image processing con- cepts in a friendly and supportive environment to students in the middle years of their secondary schooling. Categories and Subject Descriptors I.4.0 [Image Processing And Computer Vision]: Gen- eral—Image processing softwar e ; K.3.2 [Computers And Education]: Compute r and Informati on Science Edu ca- tion—Computer science education, Literacy General Terms Education Keywords digi tal image proces sing, seco ndary educa tion , elementary computer science, enquiry-based learning 1. INTRODUCTION Digital image processing courses are typically offered at the upper under gradu ate and postgr aduat e levels of elec - tri cal eng ineering pro gra ms, due, in par t, to the mathe- mati cal requi reme nts of such courses. Thes e requi reme nts Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. SIGCSE’05, February 23–27, 2005, St Louis, Missouri, USA Copyright 2005 ACM 1-58113-997-7/ 05/ 0002 ...$5.00. can be consi dera ble: mul tivariate calcu lus, linea r algebra, Fourier tra nsf orms, log ic and se t theory, to name but a few . Doughe rt y [3] prov ide s a ve ry large list of diff erent mathematical topic s whic h have rele van ce to moder n image processi ng. Other auth ors [13] have stre ssed the need for mathematics in the study of image processing. However, for explaining the fundamentals much of this mathematics is both unnecessary and obstructive. Since these fundamentals can be explained using minimal, junior high school mathematics [9], is it possible and/or desirable to introduce image processing to secondary students? Any introduction to image processing should be stimulating and instructive, whilst being appropriate to the skill level of the learners. An inspection of the current prescribed government curriculum for Information T echnology at upp er secondary school level, the CSF II (Curriculum Standards and Framework) [19] lists amongst its examples of suitable studies in the subject: simulati ons, robotics, data handl ing and presen tati on, multime dia and web authorin g. It can be seen that although the study, for example, of computer programming or mathematically oriented computer science is not prohibited by the CSF, it is not actually encouraged. Thus a student may study Information Technology and not hav e any exposu re to thes e areas, let alone digital image processing. There are good arguments [18] for image processing to be introduced to students, much earlier in their academic care ers than when they even tuall y arri ve at univ ersi ty . As many students have difficulty seeing the relevance of mathematics and science to everyday life, they can lose interest in these areas long before selection of their university course is made. Using image processing as the vehicle, we agree with Raphael and Greenberg [14], that it is possible to create a positive learning experience for secondary students. Our activity would be specifically designed as an introduction to compu ter scienc e. This idea has already been proposed by Tanimoto et al [18], but as far as we know, has not been implemented. Such an activity would need to be instructive and stimulating, and hopefully it would spark a genuine interest in the sciences amongst the participants, long before the fateful day of university course selection. On the premise that science should be fun and also in- spired by the experiences of the Mathematics Experiences Through Image Processing (METIP) project at the Univer- sity of Washington [18] and others [8, 14], the first author set about creating a set of introductory image processing exer cise s targ ete d at mid seco ndary school level . Thes e ex- ercises needed to be pedagogically sound and gender neutral. 337

A secondary look at digital image processing 2005

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