Overview :: Displaying and Exploring Images (Image Processing Toolbox User's Guide)

Image Processing Toolbox User's Guide

Overview

The Image Processing Toolbox includes two display functions, imshow and imtool. Both functions work within the Handle Graphics architecture: they create an image object and display it in an axes object contained in a figure object. The toolbox functions automatically set the values of certain figure, axes, and image object properties to control how the image data is displayed -- see Understanding Handle Graphics Object Property Settings.

imshow is the toolbox's fundamental image display function. Use imshow when you want to display any of the different image types supported by the toolbox, such as grayscale (intensity), truecolor (RGB), binary, and indexed. For more information, see Using imshow to Display Images. The imshow function is also a key building block for image applications you might want to create using the toolbox modular tools. For more information, see Building GUIs with Modular Tools.

The other toolbox display function, imtool, launches the Image Tool, which presents an integrated environment for displaying images and performing some common image processing tasks. The Image Tool provides all the image display capabilities of imshow but also provides access to several other tools for navigating and exploring images, such as scroll bars, the Pixel Region tool, the Image Information tool, and the Adjust Contrast tool. For more information, see Using the Image Tool to Explore Images.

In general, using the toolbox functions to display images is preferable to using the MATLAB image display functions image and imagesc. The toolbox functions are easier to use and are optimized for displaying images.

Displaying and Exploring Images Understanding Handle Graphics Object Property Settings