Classical Image Representations

An image data set can easily contain hundreds of thousands of measurements, and a common concern is how to handle such a huge data set. Classical approaches tend to work with reduced representations of the image, where only one measurement per pixel, most commonly the cumulative intensity or, alternatively, the signal at a particular selective wavelength, is used [111-113], These methods, while simple, do not take advantage of the quality and amount of information contained in the raw measurements. 

In this chapter, I explore the link in literature between today s public image of science and medieval alchemy in more detail and with reference to the history of science, and I will do so by focusing on the literary representation of chemists in the nineteenth century. Since twentieth-century films and popular literature featuring mad scientists frequently draw on, exploit, and simplify classics from the nineteenth century (Tourney 1992), it is this period that deserves particular attention. We will see that such figures as the mad scientist were created not for entertainment reasons, as Crichton believes, but in a nineteenth-century... 

FIGURE 12. Schematic representation of the imaging properties of vesicular and classical photographic materials (from Nieset ref. 89, with permission). 

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