Why do this? There are several reasons; a few are: to assist the human viewer in observing or communicating information in images; to minimize human bias based on wish or expectation; to introduce rigor into the process of obtaining quantitative information as a substitute for anecdote; and not least, to make us better and more aware viewers of images. Unassisted human vision is rarely a reliable scientific tool. Henry David Thoreau said “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”

The procedures in the following sections are generally applied in the order shown, as appropriate to a given image and final purpose (i.e., skip those steps that are not required in a particular application, but work from the top down). The general sequence of operations is:

Of course, original images should be archived and all processing and measurement steps documented.

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