1. A method of operating a data processing system comprising at least one hardware computing element to extract features from an image obtained from a plurality of chemical arrays, said method comprising: bifurcating processing of said image using said at least one hardware computing element of said data processing system by performing image processing and post-processing, said image processing comprising processing parts of said image, each part corresponding to a different one of said plurality of arrays in an automated batch process, to produce image-processed outputs that are different from said image and contain information extracted from said image; and said post-processing comprising processing said image-processed outputs according to different post-processing protocols with respect to different ones of said parts of said image corresponding to at least two of the plurality of the arrays, to produce post-processed outputs; and outputting at least one of said image-processed outputs and/or at least one of said post-processed outputs.