As we have developed topics in this blog, we are slowly moving into a very quantitative realm.  So for all of the serious techno-geeks reading this I’d like to give you a gift, or rather pass on a gift.  The National Institutes of Health has developed a very quantitative, very complete, and very open programing platgform called ImageJ that is available for download.  Did I mention that it is free?

ImageJ is not going to substitute for you artistic image processing software.  It isn’t meant to so .  But it does enable you to do some pretty sophisticated, quantitative image processing tasks.  Just as a simple example.  Consider the image of our Maine Surfer again (see Figure 1).  Using ImageJ, we draw a yellow line through the surface and that ask it to display the intensity values along this line.  This kind of thing will become very handy as we examine issues like image resolution further.

Figure 1 – Some simple image analysis performed woth freeware ImageJ