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The human visual system as a functional unit including the eyes, the nervous system, and the corresponding parts of the brain certainly ranks among the most important means of human information processing. The e?ciency of the biological systems is beyond the capabilities of today's technical systems, even with the fastest available computer systems. However, there are areas of application where digital image analysis systems produce acceptable results. Systems in these areas solve very specialized tasks, they operate in a limited environment, and high speed is often not necessary. Several factors determine the economical application of technical vision systems: cost, speed, ?exibility, robu- ness, functionality, and integration with other system components. Many of the recent developments in digital image processing and pattern recognition show some of the required achievements. Computer vision enhances the capabilities of computer systems - in autonomously collecting large amounts of data, - in extracting relevant information, - in perceiving its environment, and - in automatic or semiautomatic operation in this environment. The development of computer systems in general shows a steadily increasing need in computational power, which comes with decreasing hardware costs.
List of contents
Mathematical Methods for Image Analysis.- to Part I.- Numerical Harmonic Analysis and Image Processing.- Stochastic Shape Theory.- Image Compression and Coding.- Data Handling.- to Part II.- Parallel and Distributed Processing.- Image Data Catalogs.- Robust and Adaptive Image Understanding.- to Part III.- Graphs in Image Analysis.- Hierarchies.- Robust Methods.- Structural Object Recognition.- Machine Learning.- Information Fusion and Radiometric Models for Image Understanding.- to Part IV.- Information Fusion in Image Understanding.- Image Understanding Methods for Remote Sensing.- 3D Reconstruction.- to Part V.- Fundamentals.- Image Matching Strategies.- Precise Photogrammetric Measurement: Location of Targets and Reconstruction of Object Surfaces.- 3D Navigation and Reconstruction.- 3D Object Sensing Using Rotating CCD Cameras.
Summary
The challenge behind the processing of digital images is the huge amounts of data that has to be processed in an extremely short period of time. This book is a broad-ranging technical survey of computational and analytical methods and tools for digital image analysis and interpretation.
