Last update:
April 16, 1998

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Galileo and Pathfinder Images

Department of Planetary Sciences

mars channel Behind every digital image is a series of numbers. A digital image is actually a collection of thousands of tiny squares called pixels, and the numbers represent the brightness value of each individual pixel.
Dramatic enhancement can be achieved through the application of a matrix, known to image processors as a kernel. The kernel is centered over each pixel in the image and then applied. convolution
"Application" of a kernel means that the pixel value in the center of the 9x9 square is replaced by a weighted average of itself and its neighbors, based on the numbers in the matrix.

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