2010-04-08

In WWU’s scanning electron microscope competition, creative image manipulation is encouraged and entries are judged based solely on aesthetics.

What I enjoy most about this image is its dramatic depth of field effect:

grayscale SEM image of bread mold

It occurred to me that I might be able to highlight that by coloring by spatial frequency. As a quick proof of concept I used GIMP’s wavelet decomposition plugin to isolate several frequency ranges:

grayscale wavelet decomposition of the SEM image

I then arbitrarily colored each,

artificially colored wavelet decomposition of the SEM image

and finally recomposed them to produce a false color image:

SEM image color-coded by spatial frequency

It mostly worked; the color is fairly well correlated with depth, and where not it still serves to highlight interesting features. After seeing this, though, I don't think I'll pursue the idea further as I prefer the more natural aesthetic of the original.