The rapid rate at which the field of digital picture processing has grown in the past five years had necessitated extensive revisions and the introduction of topics not found in the original edition.
The late Azriel Rosenfeld was a tenured research professor, a distinguished university professor, and the Founding Director of the Center for Automation Research at the University of Maryland in College Park, where he also held affiliate professorships in the departments of computer science, electrical engineering, and psychology. Dr. Rosenfeld was widely regarded as the leading researcher in the world in the field of computer image analysis. Over a period of nearly 40 years, he made fundamental and pioneering contributions to nearly every area of that field. He wrote the first textbook in the field, was founding editor of its first journal, and was co-chairman of its first international conference. He published over 30 books and over 600 book chapters and journal articles, and directed nearly 60 Ph.D. dissertations. Dr. Rosenfeld's research on digital image analysisspecifically on digital geometry and topology and the accurate measurement of statistical features of digital images in the 1960s and 1970sformed the foundation for a generation of industrial vision inspection systems that have found widespread applications from the automotive to the electronics industry. He was a Fellow of the IEEE and the Washington Academy of Sciences; a Founding Fellow of the AAAI, the ACM, and the IAPR. Among his numerous awards and honors are the IEEE's Emanuel Piore Award, its Third Millennium Medal, and its Distinguished Service Award for Lifetime Achievement in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.
