Foreword
In packing for an office move earlier this year, I was struck by how many of my books (in many cases books sent to me free by their publishers for evaluation and potential use) were knockoffs: books that repackaged material that had been thoroughly consolidated in good textbooks years or even decades ago. Oge Marques' textbook is not a knockoff, even though much its subject matter has been around for years. It is a thoughtful and original compilation of material that is highly relevant today for students of imaging science, imaging technology, image understanding, and, foremost, image processing.
Imaging is my principal field of expertise. My interest in this book is great because imaging and image processing have grown together in recent years. Some forms of imaging—computational imaging is the buzzword that comes first to mind—presume that there will be (must be, in fact) postdetection processing of the raw information collected by the sensor system. Indeed, the sensor may output something that makes little or no sense to the observer in the absence of critical postprocessing operations.
Ultimately, in commercial mass-produced systems, image processing is implemented by specialized hardware. In the research and development stages of an imaging system, however, the processing is almost certain to be implemented using MATLAB®. Marques' book addresses this fact by linking directly to MATLAB® the many processing operations that are described.
There are of course numerous ...
