An image is a picture that has been created or copied and stored in electronic form. An image can be described in terms of vector graphics or raster graphics. An image stored in raster form is sometimes called a bitmap. An image map is a file containing information that associates different locations on a specified image with hypertext links.

Imaging is the capture, storage, manipulation, and display of images. In document imaging, the emphasis is on capturing, storing, and retrieving information from the images.