This section contains information about digital images and using Image Cartridge to build either image applications or specialized image data cartridges. Digital Images Image Cartridge provides the mechanism to integrate the storage and retrieval of digital images in Oracle databases via the Oracle8 Server. Image Cartridge supports two-dimensional, static, digital images stored as binary representations of real world objects or scenes. Images may be produced by a document or photograph scanner, a video source such as a camera or VCR connected to a video digitizer or frame grabber, other specialized image capture devices, or even by program algorithms. Capture devices take an analog or continuous signal such as the light that falls onto the film in a camera, and convert it into digital values on a two-dimensional grid of data points known as pixels.
Devices involved in the capture and display of images are under application control.
Occasionally, image applications will associate application-specific information with an image, such as including the name of the person pictured in a photograph. The organization of the image data is known as the data format . Image Cartridge can read and write image data using a variety of the data formats in use today. The storage space required for digital images can be large compared to traditional attribute data such as numbers and text. Many compression schemes are available to squeeze an image into fewer bytes, thus reducing storage device and network load.