Another less-used but very powerful way to enhance the visibility of image detail is to treat the brightness levels as elevations to generate a rendered surface representation. Human vision is highly adapted to interpreting surface geometry from the pattern of light that scatters in various directions. In a full implementation of this method, the specularity of the surface can be varied from mirror-like (polished metal) to diffuse (plaster of paris), and the light source can be positioned at an elevation and azimuth to reveal minor details without obscuring the rest of the structure. This interactive tutorial illustrates the use of rendering the appearance of a surface by interpreting pixel brightness values as elevation to increase the visibility of detail.

The tutorial initializes with a randomly selected specimen appearing in the Specimen Image window. The Choose A Specimen pull-down menu provides a selection of specimen images, in addition to the initial randomly chosen one. The Original and Rendered buttons display either the original grayscale image or the rendered result.

---

BACK TO INTRODUCTION TO DIGITAL IMAGE PROCESSING AND ANALYSIS

BACK TO MICROSCOPY PRIMER HOME

Questions or comments? Send us an email.

© 1998-2009 by Michael W. Davidson, John Russ, Olympus America Inc., and The Florida State University. All Rights Reserved. No images, graphics, scripts, or applets may be reproduced or used in any manner without permission from the copyright holders. Use of this website means you agree to all of the Legal Terms and Conditions set forth by the owners.

This website is maintained by our
Graphics & Web Programming Team
in collaboration with Optical Microscopy at the
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.

Last modification: Tuesday, Sep 11, 2018 at 12:59 PM

Access Count Since July 20, 2006: 5825

For more information on microscope manufacturers,
use the buttons below to navigate to their websites: