Nick Pears – författare

3D Imaging, Analysis and Applications brings together core topics, both in terms of well-established fundamental techniques and the most promising recent techniques in the exciting field of 3D imaging and analysis. Many similar techniques are being used in a variety of subject areas and applications and the authors attempt to unify a range of related ideas. With contributions from high profile researchers and practitioners, the material presented is informative and authoritative and represents mainstream work and opinions within the community.

Composed of three sections, the first examines 3D imaging and shape representation, the second, 3D shape analysis and processing, and the last section covers 3D imaging applications. Although 3D Imaging, Analysis and Applications is primarily a graduate text, aimed at masters-level and doctoral-level research students, much material is accessible to final-year undergraduate students. It will also serve as a reference text for professional academics, people working in commercial research and development labs and industrial practitioners.

This textbook is designed for postgraduate studies in the field of 3D Computer Vision.  It also provides a useful reference for industrial practitioners; for example, in the areas of 3D data capture, computer-aided geometric modelling and industrial quality assurance. This second edition is a significant upgrade of existing topics with novel findings. Additionally, it has new material covering consumer-grade RGB-D cameras, 3D morphable models, deep learning on 3D datasets, as well as new applications in the 3D digitization of cultural heritage and the 3D phenotyping of crops.

Overall, the book covers three main areas:

●      3D imaging, including passive 3D imaging, active triangulation 3D imaging, active time-of-flight 3D imaging, consumer RGB-D cameras, and 3D data representation and visualisation;

●      3D shape analysis, including local descriptors, registration, matching, 3D morphable models, and deep learning on 3D datasets; and 

●      3D applications, including 3D face recognition, cultural heritage and 3D phenotyping of plants.

3D computer vision is a rapidly advancing area in computer science. There are many real-world applications that demand high-performance 3D imaging and analysis and, as a result, many new techniques and commercial products have been developed. However, many challenges remain on how to analyse the captured data in a way that is sufficiently fast, robust and accurate for the application. Such challenges include metrology, semantic segmentation, classification and recognition. Thus, 3D imaging, analysis and their applications remain a highly-active research field that will continue to attract intensive attention from the research community with the ultimate goal of fully automating the 3D data capture, analysis and inference pipeline.