The most popular application of image processing is to change the visual appearance of the image such as to improve the contrast, reduce the dynamic range of brightness, reverse the 'polarity' such as dark to white and vice versa. There are many image editing tools which enable one to do such alteration in the appearance of the image. Besides such everyday uses, these operations play an important role in many domains such as medical imaging, remote sensing, to overcome the inherent limitations in imaging acquisition process, adapting the image to different displays and so on.

In this experiment, we will study an effective, yet simple, technique that manipulates the pixel values in the given image using a mapping function. You will observe that the effects of processing, greatly depends on the nature of the chosen mapping function: linear or non-linear.