Mathematical Foundations of Image Processing and Analysis, Volume 1

Introduction

I.1. Imaging sciences and technologies

The last few decades have largely been the dawning years of the era of Imaging Sciences and Technologies, which is a multidisciplinary field concerned with the (by alphabetical order) acquisition, analysis, collection, display, duplication, generation, modeling, modification, processing, reconstruction, recording, rendering, representation, simulation, synthesis and visualization, etc., of images.

From a computer science viewpoint, there are two dual fields: (1) Computer Vision, which tries to reconstruct the 3D world from observed 2D images, and (2) Computer Graphics, which pursues the opposite direction by designing suitable 2D scene images to simulate our 3D world. Image processing is the crucial middle way connecting the two. Image synthesis in the computer graphics field being the dual of image analysis treated in computer vision.

As the human visual system has been achieved by mother nature, there is nowadays a tremendous need for developing so-called Artificial Vision systems. Such systems consist of four more or less independent stages: (1) image acquisition, (2) image processing, (3) image analysis and (4) image interpretation.

“Image acquisition” mainly focuses on the physical and technological mechanisms and systems by which imaging devices generate spatial observations, but it also involves mathematical and computational models and methods implemented on computers, integrated into and/or associated to such imaging ...