The use of ultrasonic imaging to analyze defects and characterize materials is critical in the development of non-distructive testing and non-destructive evaluation (NDT/NDE) tools for manufacturing. To develop better quality control and reliability in the manufactuing environment advanced image processing techniques are useful. For example, through the use of texture filtering on ultrasound images, we have been able to filter characteristic textures from highly-textured C-scan images of materials. The materials have highly regular characteristic textures which are of the same resolution and dynamic range as other important features within the image. By applying texture filters and adaptively modifying their filter response, we have examined a family of filters for removing these textures.

The past few years have seen the growing use of digital techniques in the analysis of electron microscope image data. This trend is driven by the need to maximize the information extracted from the electron micrograph by submitting its digital representation to the broad spectrum of analytical techniques made available by the digital computer. We are developing an image processing system for the analysis of digital images obtained with a scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) and a scanning electron microscope (SEM). This system, run on an IBM PS/2 model 70/A21, uses menu-based image processing and an interactive APL interface which permits the direct manipulation of image data.

As the networking of computers becomes more ubiquitous the need to connect imaging instruments to such networks becomes a matter of greater importance. The proliferation of personal workstations with graphics capabilities in particular is putting image processing power into the hands of an increasingly large number of researchers. By connecting image acquisition systems to a local or wide area network, image data, which once could only be analyzed in the lab in which the imaging instrumentation was situated, may now be accessed in any lab equipped with appropriate image processing software and hardware; for example, image data may be remotely accessed from many modem state-of-the-art telescopic observatories.