Henri Maître - Böcker

This second edition of the fully revised and updated From Photon to Pixel presents essential elements in modern digital photographic devices. Our universal infatuation with photography profoundly affects its usage and development.While some sides of photographic “culture” remain wholly unchanged – art photography, journalistic and advertising photography, scientific photography, etc. – new facets emerge: leisure or travel photography, everyday life photography, anecdotal, observational or unusual photography, and microcosm, or micro-community, photography with its culmination in the narcissistic selfie. These new forms combine an often simplified manner of photographing and modern means of instantaneous, remote and mass communication. This book does not extend into the sociological study of photography, instead it explains how the digital camera works by examining in detail each of the components that constitutes it to provide the reader with a preliminary guide into the inner workings of this device.

Automatically evaluating the aesthetic qualities of a photograph is a current challenge for artificial intelligence technologies, yet it is also an opportunity to open up new economic and social possibilities.Aesthetics in Digital Photography presents theories developed over the last 25 centuries by philosophers and art critics, who have sometimes been governed by the objectivity of perception, and other times, of course, by the subjectivity of human judgement. It explores the advances that have been made in neuro-aesthetics and their current limitations.In the field of photography, this book puts aesthetic hypotheses up against experimental verification, and then critically examines attempts to "scientifically" measure this beauty. Special attention is paid to artificial intelligence techniques, taking advantage of machine learning methods and large databases.

Computer-aided automatic processing of images requires the control of a series of operations, which this book analyzes.Knowing the statistical properties of images, sampling them to reduce the observable world to a series of discrete values, restoring images in order to correct degradations – all these operations are explained here, together with the mathematical tools they require.Topics covered include fractal representation, mathematical morphology, wavelet representations and the detection and description of contours and shapes.

Synthetic aperture radar provides broad-area imaging at high resolutions, which is used in applications such as environmental monitoring, earth-resource mapping, and military systems.This book presents the tools required for the digital processing of synthetic aperture radar images. They are of three types: (a) the elements of physics, (b) mathematical models and (c) image processing methods adapted to particular applications.

The digital camera conceals remarkable technological innovations that affect the formation of the image, the color representation or automated measurements and settings.** From photon to pixel photon ** describes the device both from the point of view of the physics of the phenomena involved, as technical components and software it uses. Based on the perceptual properties of the visual system as well as on standard transmission and representation, analyzes the solutions to meet the demands of the photographer on the development, contrast, white balance or stabilization of image.The advanced architectures adopted in mobile phones and developments of computational photography are also presented, foreshadowing the features of the future device.