Concerning this book

We have written this book at two levels, the principal level being introductory. “Introductory” does not mean “easy” or “simple” or “doesn't require math.” Rather, the introductory topics are those which need to be mastered before the advanced topics can be understood.

In addition, the book is intended to be useful as a reference. When you have to study a topic in more detail than is covered here, in order, for example, to implement a practical system, we have tried to provide adequate citations to the relevant literature to get you off to a good start.

We have tried to write in a style aimed directly toward the student and in a conversational tone.

We have also tried to make the text readable and entertaining. Words which are deluberately missppelled for humorous affects should be ubvious. Some of the humor runs to exaggeration and to puns; we hope you forgive us.

We did not attempt to cover every topic in the machine vision area. In particular, nearly all papers in the general areas of optical character recognition and face recognition have been omitted; not to slight these very important and very successful application areas, but rather because the papers tend to be rather specialized; in addition, we simply cannot cover everything.