David A. Forsyth – författare

Appropriate for upper-division undergraduate- and graduate-level courses in computer vision found in departments of Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering.

This textbook provides the most complete treatment of modern computer vision methods by two of the leading authorities in the field. This accessible presentation gives both a general view of the entire computer vision enterprise and also offers sufficient detail for students to be able to build useful applications. Students will learn techniques that have proven to be useful by first-hand experience and a wide range of mathematical methods.

Computer vision has been successful in several important applications recently. Vision techniques can now be used to build very good models of buildings from pictures quickly and easily, to overlay operation planning data on a neuros- geon’s view of a patient, and to recognise some of the gestures a user makes to a computer. Object recognition remains a very di cult problem, however. The key questions to understand in recognition seem to be: (1) how objects should be represented and (2) how to manage the line of reasoning that stretches from image data to object identity. An important part of the process of recognition { perhaps, almost all of it { involves assembling bits of image information into helpful groups. There is a wide variety of possible criteria by which these groups could be established { a set of edge points that has a symmetry could be one useful group; others might be a collection of pixels shaded in a particular way, or a set of pixels with coherent colour or texture. Discussing this process of grouping requires a detailed understanding of the relationship between what is seen in the image and what is actually out there in the world.