Importing and displaying an image

Now that we have seen most of the menus and windows we will be using, let's start with the very basics of image processing. MATLAB is a computing language that works with matrices. Consequently, in order for us to work with images, they have to be imported as matrix variables in MATLAB. There are several ways to accomplish this. Here, we will see the most practical ones.

Importing and displaying an image using the command line

The most generic—compatible with almost all versions of the software that include the Image Processing Toolbox—way to import an image in MATLAB is through the command line.

In the command line, you can type commands that invoke the functions that have been installed with MATLAB. Functions can be thought of as black boxes, which can be fed with appropriate inputs and provide appropriate outputs.

The MATLAB function that can be used to import images is imread. The easiest way to use it is to type it into the command line, passing the path to an image as the input string. This will import the image into a variable in the MATLAB workspace. The name of the variable is defined by you, by assigning a name to the output. Once you have done this, you can then display your image by using imshow. This function is designed to display a matrix variable as an image. Let's see now how you can import and display your first image using the command line.

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