Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications

This book also reflect my twenty years' experience doing computer vision research in corporate research labs, mostly at Digital Equipment Corporation's Cambridge Research Lab and at Microsoft Research. In pursuing my work, I have mostly focused on problems and solution techniques (algorithms) that have practical real-world applications and that work well in practice. Thus, this book has more emphasis on basic techniques that work under real-world conditions, and less on more esoteric mathematics that has intrinsic elegance but less practical applicability.

This book is suitable for teaching a senior-level undergraduate course in computer vision to students in both computer science and electrical engineering. I prefer students that have either an image processing or a computer graphics course as a prerequisite so that they can spend less time learning general background mathematics and more time studying computer vision techniques. The book is also suitable for teaching graduate-level courses in computer vision (by delving into the more demanding application and algorithmic areas), and as a general reference to fundamental techniques and recent research literature. To this end, I have attempted wherever possible to at least cite the newest research in each sub-field, even if the technical details are too complex to cover in the book itself.