An interdisciplinary course in digital image processing

Abstract

This paper documents the development and first offering of an interdisciplinary undergraduate course in Digital Image Processing at the University of Wyoming. The course itself was designed to serve majors from a wide range of academic disciplines, although in its initial offering, it was attented mainly by students majoring in Computre Science and Electrical Engineering. National Foundation funding for equipment for the course was used to purchase a high speed image processing system and six state-of-the-art graphics workstations with software that supported basic and intermediate level image processing operations. Students in the course were required to perform a standard set of image processing sequences such as histogramming and histogram equalization, edge detection and evaluation, image smoothing, region growing, Fourier filtering, and image warping. Each student, in consultation with the instructor, then pursued a specific topic in image processing which involved either combining several image processing operations to produce a desired result or developing special code to implement image processing algorithms that were discussed in the text but not included in the provided software. The nature of the course and its impact on education at the University of Wyoming is discussed in the paper that follows.