Advancing Microsoft Excel's Potential for Low-Cost Digital Image Processing and Analysis
Peter Ako Larbi · 2016
Abstract. Microsoft Excel is not considered as a typical software for digital image processing and analysis. However, based on its large data handling and graphing capabilities, as well as its widespread usage, it presents a good opportunity for use as a teaching tool for image data processing. It also lends itself well as a useful research tool that can benefit a wide range of potential users without the need to know computer programming. In view of these potentials, a new method has been developed consisting of systematic procedures for implementing typical image processing operations in Excel. Categories of operations performed using this method include image preprocessing, image enhancement, image classification, and analysis of change over time. Examples of outputs resulting from using this new method are discussed in the paper. The success of this method is hinged on the availability of the required image data, based on which a simple graphical user interface (GUI) application was developed in MATLAB. That application, RGBExcel or the later RGB2X, extracts RGB image data from image files of any format and file size, and exports to Excel for processing.