Preface

Image processing, analysis, and machine vision are an exciting and dynamic part of cog-nitive and computer science. Following an explosion of interest during the 1970s and 1980s, subsequent decades were characterized by a maturing of the field and significant growth of active applications; remote sensing, technical diagnostics, autonomous vehicle guidance, biomedical imaging (2D, 3D, and 4D) and automatic surveillance are the most rapidly developing areas. This progress can be seen in an increasing number of software and hardware products on the market—as a single example of many, the omnipresence of consumer-level digital cameras, each of which depends on a sophisticated chain of embedded consumer-invisible image processing steps performed in real time, is strik-ing. Reflecting this continuing development, the number of digital image processing and machine vision courses offered at universities worldwide continues to increase rapidly. There are many texts available in the areas we cover—a lot of them are referenced in this book. The subject suffers, however, from a shortage of texts which are ‘complete ’ in the sense that they are accessible to the novice, of use to the educated, and up to date. Here we present the fourth edition of a text first published in 1993. We include man