It even worked with a telescope, allowing his students to record the sky's celestial wonders. The find was particularly satisfying. Such feats of ingenuity are a Lehman trademark, says JoAnn Mulvany, director of the Science, Mathematics, and Technology Specialty Center, the Henrico County magnet school where Lehman teaches. Students now make their own digital pictures of sand samples from different parts of the world and analyze them with the image-processing equipment. Comparing granules on a computer screen, they can see for themselves how, say, quartz and magnetite sands differ.
Image processing is something scientists have been doing for years.
Medical technicians, for example, process images when they do ultrasound tests on patients. That value may represent brightness, temperature, elevation, or some other measurement that the researcher wants to examine. Each pixel is colored, with the shade determined by its numeric value. Using the digital-processing software, researchers can bring out previously undetected features or patterns by adjusting the pixel values and display colors in the digital image. Image processing does not use the computer as a 'viewer' but as a tool to make measurements and analyze data,'' Dahlman explains.