This book grew out of our efforts to provide a balanced coverage of essential elements of machine vision systems to students in our undergraduate and early graduate classes. The field of machine vision, or computer vision, has been growning at a fast face. The growth in this field, unlike most established fields, has been both in breadth and depth of concepts and techniques.

This introduction to the field of computer vision focuses on basic concepts and techniques. The thrust is to give practitioners what they need to know to develop a practical machine vision system. Binary vision, segmentation, constraint propagation techniques are presented as are camera calibration, color and texture, detection of motion, and object recognition. This text is appropriate for use in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering departments at the senior and graduate level.