Preface
The prospect of using computers to emulate some of the attributes of the human visual system has attracted the interest of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians for more than 30 years, making the field of image processing one of the fastest-growing branches of applied computer science research. During the past 15 years, the fields of image and video processing have experienced tremendous growth and become more popular and accessible. This growth has been driven by several factors: widely available and relatively inexpensive hardware; a variety of software tools for image and video editing, manipulation, and processing; popularization of the Web and its strong emphasis on visual information, a true revolution in photography that has rendered film-based cameras all but obsolete; advances in the movie industry; and groundbreaking changes on the way we watch, record, and share TV programs and video clips.
Approach
This book provides a practical introduction to the most important topics in image and video processing, using MATLAB® (and its Image Processing Toolbox) as a tool to demonstrate relevant techniques and algorithms. The word Practical in its title is not meant to suggest a coverage of all the latest consumer electronics products in these fields; this knowledge would be superficial at best and would be obsolete shortly after (or even before!) the publication of the book. The word Practical should rather be interpreted in the sense of “enabling the reader/student ...
