Brain tumors are abnormal tissue growths in the brain that affect brain function. There are two main types - malignant (cancerous) tumors, which grow quickly, and benign (non-cancerous) tumors, which grow slowly. Early detection of brain tumors is possible using medical imaging techniques like MRI, CT scans, x-rays, and machine learning/image processing. The key steps in digital image processing for brain tumor detection are pre-processing, segmentation to separate tumor from healthy tissue, feature extraction, and classification.