Unlike the functions and algorithms that we've seen so far in this chapter, the algorithms in this section perform an atomic and complete operation on the image (or matrix) itself and are not considered element-wise operations in the sense that has been described so far. If you recall, the rule of thumb for element-wise operations was that they can be easily parallelized since the resulting matrix is dependent on corresponding pixels of two images, whereas the functions and algorithms we'll learn about in this chapter are not easily parallelizable, or the resulting pixels and values might have little or nothing at all to do with their corresponding source pixels, or quite the opposite, the resulting pixels might depend on some or all of the input pixels at the same time.