Computer Vision is a rapidly growing field of research investigating computational and algorithmic issues associated with image acquisition, processing, and understanding. It serves tasks like manipulation, recognition, mobility, and communication in diverse application areas such as manufacturing, robotics, medicine, security and virtual reality. This volume contains a selection of papers devoted to theoretical foundations of computer vision covering a broad range of fields, e.g. motion analysis, discrete geometry, computational aspects of vision processes, models, morphology, invariance, image compression, 3D reconstruction of shape. Several issues have been identified to be of essential interest to the community: non-linear operators; the transition between continuous to discrete representations; a new calculus of non-orthogonal partially dependent systems.

This book introduces the fundamentals of computer vision (CV), with a focus on extracting useful information from digital images and videos. Including a wealth of methods used in detecting and classifying image objects and their shapes, it is the first book to apply a trio of tools (computational geometry, topology and algorithms) in solving CV problems, shape tracking in image object recognition and detecting the repetition of shapes in single images and video frames. Computational geometry provides a visualization of topological structures such as neighborhoods of points embedded in images, while image topology supplies us with structures useful in the analysis and classification of image regions. Algorithms provide a practical, step-by-step means of viewing image structures. The implementations of CV methods in Matlab and Mathematica, classification of chapter problems with the symbols (easily solved) and (challenging) and its extensive glossary of key words, examples and connections with the fabric of CV make the book an invaluable resource for advanced undergraduate and first year graduate students in Engineering, Computer Science or Applied Mathematics. It offers insights into the design of CV experiments, inclusion of image processing methods in CV projects, as well as the reconstruction and interpretation of recorded natural scenes.

This textbook provides an accessible general introduction to the essential topics in computer vision. Classroom-tested programming exercises and review questions are also supplied at the end of each chapter. Features: provides an introduction to the basic notation and mathematical concepts for describing an image and the key concepts for mapping an image into an image; explains the topologic and geometric basics for analysing image regions and distributions of image values and discusses identifying patterns in an image; introduces optic flow for representing dense motion and various topics in sparse motion analysis; describes special approaches for image binarization and segmentation of still images or video frames; examines the basic components of a computer vision system; reviews different techniques for vision-based 3D shape reconstruction; includes a discussion of stereo matchers and the phase-congruency model for image features; presents an introduction into classification and learning.

This book contains a selection of papers which were presented at the Vision Interface '92 Conference. It also includes several invited articles from prominent researchers in the field, suggesting future directions in Computer Vision.

A modern treatment focusing on learning and inference, with minimal prerequisites, real-world examples and implementable algorithms.

The problem of scale pervades both the natural sciences and the vi sual arts. The earliest scientific discussions concentrate on visual per ception (much like today!) and occur in Euclid's (c. 300 B. C. ) Optics and Lucretius' (c. 100-55 B. C. ) On the Nature of the Universe. A very clear account in the spirit of modern "scale-space theory" is presented by Boscovitz (in 1758), with wide ranging applications to mathemat ics, physics and geography. Early applications occur in the cartographic problem of "generalization", the central idea being that a map in order to be useful has to be a "generalized" (coarse grained) representation of the actual terrain (Miller and Voskuil 1964). Broadening the scope asks for progressive summarizing. Very much the same problem occurs in the (realistic) artistic rendering of scenes. Artistic generalization has been analyzed in surprising detail by John Ruskin (in his Modern Painters), who even describes some of the more intricate generic "scale-space sin gularities" in detail: Where the ancients considered only the merging of blobs under blurring, Ruskin discusses the case where a blob splits off another one when the resolution is decreased, a case that has given rise to confusion even in the modern literature.