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The article discusses the growth of Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Co. (3M) as of 1964. With its acquisition of Ferrania, S.p.A., 3M has added 5,400 employees and gained a nearly 50 million dollar a year foothold in the European photographic industry. 3M is best known for producing Scotch Tape, but it has become less and less important in the company's business. It notes the benefits of its partnership with Thermo-Fax for its image-forming business.

A method of converting a picture into a "cartoon" S S or map whose regions correspond to differently textured regions is described. Texture edges in the pica hire are detected, and solid regions surrounded by these (usually broken) edges are "colored in" using a propagation process. The resulting map is cleaned by comparing the region colors with the textures of the corresponding regions in the picture, and also by merging some regions with others according to criteria based on topology and size. The method has been applied to the construction of cloud cover maps from cloud cover pictures obtained by satellites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this report three thinning algorithms are developed: one each for use with rectangular, hexagonal, and triangular arrays. The approach to the development of each algorithm is the same. Pictorial results produced by each of the algorithms are presented and the relative performances of the algorithms are compared. It is found that the algorithm operating with the triangular array is the most sensitive to image irregularities and noise, yet it will yield a thinned image with an overall reduced number of points. It is concluded that the algorithm operating in conjunction with the hexagonal array has features which strike a balance between those of the other two arrays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses an interactive computer-controlled scanning and display system for pattern recognition and signal processing. Components of the system; Description of the system design and programming support; Application to scanner control, optical character recognition and image processing.

There are situations in the natural sciences and medicine (e.g. in electron microscopy and X-ray photography in which it is desirable to estimate the gray levels of a digital picture at the individual points from the sums of the gray levels along straight tines (projections) at a Few angles. Usually, in such situations, the picture is far from determined and the problem is to find the "most representative" picture. Three algorithms are described (all using Monte Carlo methods which were designed to solve this problem. The algorithms are applicable in a large and varied number of fields. The most important uses may he the reconstruction of possibly asymmetric particles from electron micrographs and three-dimensional X-ray analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines a technique for recognizing systems of lines in image processing. Decision process used to recognize the input picture of the optimal system of lines; Relationship between the structure of the figure of merit and the complexity of the optimization process; Suitability of the technique for parallel processing.

A preliminary description of the software for a computer- display system is given with special emphasis on the mane machine interaction. This system is intended for a wide variety of biomedical applications. As an example, the methods are applied to the karyotyping of chromosomes. The system is separated into four programming tasks: picture transformations, file maintenance, picture structuring, and display management. Picture structuring is considered as the vehicle for man-machine communication. A prototype data format for pictures, called a picture-form, is developed. Structure operators are defined which manipulate picture-forms to produce new picture-forms. Many of the ideas are taken from the symbolic mathematical laboratory at MIT conceived by Marvin Minsky. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optical and digital holography are reviewed. The mathematical model and computational techniques of the authors' digital holographic process are discussed, and applications of computer holography are suggested. Computer holograms have been made of three-dimensional objects which give faithful reconstructions, even in white light. A new approach based on point apertures for the image is discussed. Photographs of the images reconstructed from digital holograms are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Any region can be regarded as a union of maximal neighborhoods of its points, and can be specified by the centers and radii of these neighborhoods; this set is a sort of "skeleton" of the region. The storage required to represent a region in this way is comparable to that required when it is represented by encoding its boundary. Moreover, the skeleton representation seems to have advantages when it is necessary to determine repeatedly whether points are inside or outside the region, or to perform set-theoretic operations on regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the annual spring meeting of the National Academy of Sciences. The meeting took place at the National Museum from April 16-18, 1912. George E. Hale, director of the Mount Wilson Solar Observatory, described the new tower telescope of that observatory. The usual types of telescopes have been the refractor, consisting of a lens set in a tube mounted equatorially, that is, carried upon an axis parallel to that of the earth, and forming an image of the heavenly body that moves about, as the earth revolves, and, secondly, of a reflecting concave mirror similarly mounted, and torming likewise a moving image.

The article discusses Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing's (3M) growing competition against established companies in the image-forming industry in the U.S. in 1964. The company's competitors in the image-forming business include Kodak, Xerox and Harris-Intertype. It cites the trends that are turning image-forming or graphic communications into a bigger business, such as the changing technology and the growing interplay among the technologies of chemistry, electronics and printing, among others.

The article focuses on Benjamin Berkey, president of Berkey Photo Inc. According to Berkey, luck and talent are required to achieve business success. In 1954, the U.S. Department of Justice has forced Eastman Kodak to enter into a consent decree. Under this deal, Kodak has agreed to license its color processes. Taking advantage of this decree was Berkey's photograph-processing and camera-importing outfit. As of 1966, Berkey Photo Inc. is generating 23 million U.S. dollars annually.