A "secondary" look at digital image processing

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 involves working with a digital camera, taking, capturing and saving images, and exploring pixel values and their relationship to image brightness and colour. We also perform some elementary processing tasks: thresholding, changing spatial resolution and quantization. Students then have a brief introduction to spatial filtering, followed by some examples: image blurring and edge detection. The activity finishes with some binary morphology. Given that digital image processing is usually offered only at the upper undergraduate or postgraduate level, we have demonstrated that it is quite possible to introduce some image processing concepts in a friendly and supportive environment to students in the middle years of their secondary schooling. Copyright 2005 ACM.