Data, models, and images

Despite the fact that images constitute the main objects in machine vision, there is remarkably little concern about their actual definition. An operational definition is proposed beyond machine-specific technicalities. Such a definition is of interest in the design of applications for which the details of the storage or processing medium are not crucially important (the usual case). It provides a unified conceptual framework for various existing theories and techniques, such as scale-space theory and mathematical morphology, and possibly other, nonlinear image representations