1.6.1 Journals and magazines
As in any academic subject, there are many sources of literature. The professional magazines include those that are more systems oriented, like Image Processing and Advanced Imaging. These provide more general articles, and are often a good source of information about new computer vision products. For example, Image Processing often surveys available equipment, such as cameras and monitors, and provides a tabulated listing of those available, including some of the factors by which you might choose to purchase them. Advanced Imaging is another professional journal that can cover material of commercial and academic interest. There is a wide selection of research journals – probably more than you can find in your nearest library unless it is particularly well stocked. These journals have different merits: some are targeted at short papers only, whereas some have short and long papers; some are more dedicated to the development of new theory whereas others are more pragmatic and
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% Parameters: image-array of points %
% Author: Mark S. Nixon %get dimensions
[rows,cols]=size(image);
%find the maximum maxi=max(max(image));
%subtract image points from maximum for x=1:cols %address all columns
for y=1:rows %address all rows inverted(y,x)=maxi-image(y,x); end
end
focus more on practical, working, image processing systems. But it is rather naive to classify journals in this way, since all journals welcome good research, with new ideas, which has been demonstrated to satisfy promising objectives.
The main research journals include: IEEE Transactions on: Pattern Analysis and Machine
Intelligence (in later references this will be abbreviated to IEEE Trans. on PAMI); Image Processing (IP); Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC); and Medical Imaging (there are
many more IEEE transactions, some of which sometimes publish papers of interest in image processing and computer vision). The IEEE Transactions are usually found in (university) libraries since they are available at comparatively low cost. Computer Vision
and Image Understanding and Graphical Models and Image Processing arose from the
splitting of one of the subject’s earlier journals, Computer Vision, Graphics and Image
Processing (CVGIP), into two parts. Do not confuse Pattern Recognition (Pattern Recog.)
with Pattern Recognition Letters (Pattern Recog. Lett.), published under the aegis of the Pattern Recognition Society and the International Association of Pattern Recognition, respectively, since the latter contains shorter papers only. The International Journal of
Computer Vision is a more recent journal whereas Image and Vision Computing was established
in the early 1980s. Finally, do not miss out on the IEE Proceedings – Vision, Image and
Signal Processing and IEE Proceedings – Digital Techniques.
Some of the journals are now on-line but usually to subscribers only, in the UK through Ingenta through BIDS (you need an account at Bath Information and Data Services at
http://www.bids.ac.uk/). Academic Press appear to be mostly on-line now, including
Computer Vision and Image Understanding, Graphical Models and Image Processing and Real-Time Imaging at http://www.apnet.com/www/journal/iv.htm, http:/ / w w w . a p n e t . c o m / w w w / j o u r n a l / i p . h t m, and h t t p : / / w w w .
academicpress.com/rti respectively.
1.6.2 Textbooks
There are many textbooks in this area. Increasingly, there are web versions, or web support, as summarised in Table 1.4. This text aims to start at the foundation of computer vision, and ends very close to a research level. Its content specifically addresses techniques for image analysis, considering shape analysis in particular. Mathcad and Matlab are used as a vehicle to demonstrate implementation, which is rarely considered in other texts. But there are other texts, and these can help you to develop your interest in other areas of computer vision.
This section includes only a selection of some of the texts. There are more than these, some of which will be referred to in later chapters; each offers a particular view or insight into computer vision and image processing. The introductory texts include: Fairhurst, M. C.: Computer Vision for Robotic Systems (Fairhurst, 1988); Low, A.: Introductory
Computer Vision and Image Processing (Low, 1991); Teuber, J.: Digital Image Processing
(Teuber, 1993); and Baxes, G. A.: Digital Image Processing, Principles and Applications (Baxes, (1994) which includes software and good coverage of image processing hardware. Some of the main textbooks include: Marr, D.: Vision (Marr, 1982) which concerns vision and visual perception (as previously mentioned); Jain, A. K.: Fundamentals of
Computer Vision (Jain, 1989) which is stacked with theory and technique, but omits
implementation and some image analysis; Sonka, M., Hllavac, V. and Boyle, R. Image
Processing, Analysis and Computer Vision (Sonka, 1998) offers more modern coverage of
implementation but omitting some image processing theory; Jain, R. C., Kasturi, R. and Schunk, B. G.: Machine Vision (Jain, 1995) offers concise and modern coverage of 3D and motion (there is an on-line website at http://vision.cse.psu.edu/ with code and images, together with corrections); Gonzalez, R. C. and Wintz, P.: Digital Image
Processing (Gonzalez, 1987) has more tutorial element than many of the basically theoretical
texts; Rosenfeld, A. and Kak, A. C.: Digital Picture Processing (Rosenfeld and Kak, 1982) is rather dated now, but is a well-proven text for much of the basic material; and Pratt, W. K.: Digital Image Processing (Pratt, 1992) which was originally one of the earliest books on image processing and, like Rosenfeld and Kak, is a well-proven text for much of the basic material, particularly image transforms. Despite its name, the recent text called
Active Contours (Blake, 1998) concentrates rather more on models of motion and deformation
and probabalistic treatment of shape and motion, than on the active contours which we shall find here. As such it is a more research text, reviewing many of the advanced techniques to describe shapes and their motion. A recent text in this field, Image Processing – The
Fundamentals (Petrou, 1999) surveys the subject (as its title implies) from an image
processing viewpoint covering not only image transforms, but also restoration and enhancement before edge detection. The latter of these is most appropriate for one of the major contributors to that subject. Also, Kasturi, R. and Jain, R. C. (eds): Computer Vision:
Principles (Kasturi, 1991a) and Computer Vision: Advances and Applications (Kasturi,
1991b) presents a collection of seminal papers in computer vision, many of which are cited in their original form (rather than in this volume) in later chapters. There are other interesting edited collections (Chellappa, 1992), one edition (Bowyer, 1996) honours Azriel Rosenfeld’s many contributions.
Books which include a software implementation include: Lindley, C. A.: Practical
Image Processing in C (Lindley, 1991) and Pitas, I.: Digital Image Processing Algorithms
(Pitas, 1993) which both cover basic image processing and computer vision algorithms. Table 1.4 Web textbooks and homepages
This book’s Southampton U http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~msn/book/
homepage
CVOnline Edinburgh U http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/CVonline/
Ad Oculos Imaging Source http://www.theimagingsource. com/prod/link/adoculos.htm
Image Processing Delft University http://www.ph.tn.tudelft.nl/
Fundamentals Courses/FIP/noframes/fip.html
World of Wolfram Research http://mathworld.wolfram.com
Mathematics
Numerical Recipes Cambridge http://www.nr.com/
University Press
The Joy of Visual York U http://www.yorku.ca/research/
Perception vision/eye/thejoy.htm
Machine Vision Penn State http://vision.cse.psu.edu/
homepage
Active Contours Oxford U http://www.robots.ox.ac.
Parker, J. R.: Practical Computer Vision Using C (Parker, 1994) offers an excellent description and implementation of low-level image processing tasks within a well-developed framework, but again does not extend to some of the more recent and higher level processes in computer vision and includes little theory though there is more in his later text Image
Processing and Computer Vision (Parker, 1996). A recent text Computer Vision and Image Processing (Umbaugh, 1998) takes an applications-oriented approach to computer vision
and image processing, offering a variety of techniques in an engineering format, together with a working package with a GUI. One recent text concentrates on Java only, Image
Processing in Java (Lyon, 1999), and concentrates more on image processing systems
implementation than on feature extraction (giving basic methods only). As already mentioned, the newest textbook (Efford, 2000) offers Java implementation, though it omits much of the mathematical detail making it a lighter (more enjoyable?) read. Masters, T.: Signal and
Image Processing with Neural Networks – A C++ Sourcebook (Masters, 1994) offers good
guidance in combining image processing technique with neural networks and gives code for basic image processing technique, such as frequency domain transformation.
There are now a number of books on the web as given in Table 1.4. This book’s homepage has a link to these web-based texts, and will be kept as up to date as possible. The CVOnline site describes a great deal of technique, whereas the Ad Oculos page describes the book that supports the software. Image Processing Fundamentals is a textbook for image processing. The World of Mathematics comes from Wolfram research (the distributors of Mathematica) and gives an excellent web-based reference for mathematics. Numerical
Recipes is one of the best established texts in signal processing. It is beautifully written,
with examples and implementation and is on the web too. The Joy of Perception gives you web access to the processes involved in human vision (and the worst title?).
Other textbooks include: Russ, J. C.: The Image Processing Handbook (Russ, 1995)
which contains much basic technique with excellent visual support, but without any supporting theory, and has many practical details concerning image processing systems; Davies, E. R.:
Machine Vision: Theory, Algorithms and Practicalities (Davies, 1994) which is targeted
primarily at (industrial) machine vision systems but covers much basic technique, with pseudocode to describe their implementation; and Awcock, G. J. and Thomas, R.: Applied
Image Processing (Awcock, 1995) which again has much practical detail concerning image
processing systems and implementation.
1.6.3 The web
The web entries continue to proliferate. A list of web pages is given in Table 1.5 and these give you a starting point from which to build up your own list of favourite bookmarks. All these links, and more are available at this book’s homepage http://www.ecs.
soton.ac.uk/~msn/book/). This will be checked regularly and kept up to date.
The web entries in Table 1.5 start with the Carnegie Mellon homepage (called the Computer Vision Homepage). The Computer Vision Online CVOnline homepage has been brought to us by Bob Fisher from the University of Edinburgh. There’s a host of material there, including its description. Their group also proves the Hypermedia Image Processing Website and in their words: ‘HIPR2 is a free www-based set of tutorial materials for the 50 most commonly used image processing operators. It contains tutorial text, sample results and Java demonstrations of individual operators and collections.’ It covers a lot of basic material and shows you the results of various processing options. A big list of active groups can be
found at the Computer Vision homepage and searchers like Google or Altavista can be a boon when trawling the web. If your university has access to the web-based indexes of published papers, the ISI index gives you journal papers (and allows for citation search), but unfortunately including medicine and science (where you can get papers with 30+ authors). Alternatively, Compendex and INSPEC include papers more related to engineering, together with papers in conferences, and hence vision (INSPEC in particular), but without the ability to search citations. Citeseer is increasingly useful. Two newsgroups can be found at the addresses given in Table 1.5 to give you what is perhaps the most up-to-date information.