Dr. Mariusz Jankowski

Department of Electrical Engineering
University of Southern Maine
37 College Ave., Gorham, Maine 04038
mjkcc@usm.maine.edu

Teaching Digital Image Processing with Mathematica

Digital Image Processing (ELE489) is a senior-level elective that, in spite of the relatively complex mathematics involved, attracts a lot of student interest (maybe because of those many pictures in the textbook?!). Typically, however very little image "processing" actually occurs, since the traditional computational tools are not suitable for the classroom, especially in the context of interactive lectures. It is well known that code development in high-level languages such as Fortran or C detracts from the desired goal of teaching the basic concepts of the discipline. This leads to dissapointment and eventual loss of interest on the part of the student. At the same time, the many interesting computational problems in digital image processing are an excellent vehicle for teaching digital signal fundamentals. By introducing the computer into the classroom in a significant way, the promise of an interesting and challenging hands-on learning experience can be fulfilled.

Following several years of experimentation with a variety of different computational tools (C, Basic, PVwave, Mathcad and spreadsheets) the department of Electrical Engineering has begun a process of integrating Mathematica into the curriculum. This year's ELE489 class was the first to use Mathematica in a computer classroom during lectures. Over half of the 28, 1 1/4 hour class sessions were held in this classroom, the remaining being more or less traditional, instructor led lectures.

The course is an introduction to the basic concepts and methodologies for digital image processing. The textbook "Digital Image Processing" by Gonzalez and Woods (1993) was supplemented by 12 Mathematica notebooks, written by the instructor, covering the major topics of the course. Each of the notebooks was used in one or more of the lecture sessions held in the computer-equipped classroom. The notebooks contain many course and application specific new functions that extend Mathematica's built-in functionality. In their present form, they are a combination of lecture notes, laboratory manual pages and homework assignments. They are simple prototypes for the electronic textbooks of the future, interactive, animated and available via remote links. The notebooks are available online and can be viewed as static documents with WWW browsers or downloaded and executed on computers running Mathematica.

Thomas L. Marchioro II
uces_info@krellinst.org
17 July, 1997