Laurel Joyce | Feb 16, 1992 | 6 min read
A picture may not be worth a thousand words to a scientist unless it can be manipulated to yield useful information. One way of gleaning such data is computerized image processing, a technique for quantifying visual images. With an image-process- ing system, a geologist can build contour maps from satellite photos, a plant physiologist can count and measure individual cells in a leaf, and a molecular biologist can analyze an autoradiograph from a DNA sequencing gel. In the past decade, the com