
Preface to the Third Edition
A main incentive for me to write a third edition of this book stemmed from my
increasing enthusiasm fo r the Python programming language. I began to see
the advantage of illustrating the many image processing algorithms covere d
in earlier editions of the text not o nly in the powerful and convenient, but
not inexpensive, ENVI/IDL world, but also on a widely available open source
platform. Python, together with the Numpy and Scipy packages, ca n hold its
own with any commercial array processing s oftware system. Furthermore, the
Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL) and its Python wrappers allow
for great versatility ...