MIT Press, 2000. — 475p.Our knowledge of the world surrounding us is mediated by our senses. In visual perception, we sense the light emanating from objects in the environment and infer from this light a wealth of information about the environment. We are able to “see” depth and shape of objects, the color of surfaces, the segmentation of the scene into distinct objects, or the mood of a partner in a conversation. All this is based on images, i.e., two-dimensional distributions of intensities, which as such do not at all contain depth, shape, or moods. The fact that we are able to see all this is among the most amazing and fascinating abilities of our brain.
In this book, the performance of the perceptual apparatus is discussed on the level of information processing. Contributions from psychophysics and computational neuroscience are given equal weight as theories and algorithms developed for machine vision and photogrammetry. Indeed, this combination is the very idea of computational vision. In the tradition of Bela Julesz and David Marr, most of the book is devoted to early vision, i.e., stages of visual processing that do not require top down inferences from “higher” stages. However, in biological organisms as well as in robots, vision has to serve a purpose. Aspects of behavior-oriented vision covered in the book include eye movement and visual navigation.
The book is based on courses given since at the universities of Mainz, Bochum, and Tübingen I tried to keep it readable for students of psychology and the neurosciences as well as for students with a physics or computer vision background. The mathematical material is selected such as to give a survey of the various techniques employed in computational vision. Most of the ideas are introduced simultaneously as “prose” text, by formal equations, and in figures. As an additional refresher of college mathematics, a glossary of mathematical terms has been compiled.Part I Fundamentals
Introduction
Imaging
Part II Contrast, Form, and Color
Representation and processing of images
Edge detection
Color and color constancy
Part III Depth Perception
Stereoscopic vision
Shape from shading
Texture and surface orientation
Part IV Motion
Motion detection
Optical flow
Visual navigation
