Fundamentals of electronic imaging systems. Some aspects of image processing. (Q1188954)

This book originally grew out of courses taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the author and two of his former students, Thomas S. Huang and Oleh J. Tretiak. Like the courses, it is primarily intended for electrical engineers and computer scientists wo plan to work in the field. It has not proven necessary to spend much time on strictly digital issues, since the students already known that material or can learn it easily by themselves. What is attempted here is to give the reader enough contemporary information about the real world of images and image making that he can effectively apply appropriate science and technology to the solution of practical problems. The following questions are dealt with: -- What is an image, and how it is distinguished from an arbitrary function? -- Where does it come from, where does it go to, and what are its fundamental characteristics? -- What are the effects on these characteristics of the laws of physics and the properties of modern imaging devices and systems? -- How do we perceive images? How is the performance of systems affected and how should their design be influenced by the properties of the observer? -- How do we transform effectively between the discrete world of modern signal processing and the continuous worlds of objects and observers? -- To what extent is it possible to take advantage of the properties of scenes to be imaged and viewers to be served to reduce the amount of data required to reconstruct images? How do we evaluate the performance of such compression systems when they invariably alter the objective image parameters? What is the role of statistical compression systems? The first six chapters appeared in the 1986 edition. Obvious errors have been corrected, but the earlier work has not been extensively revised. Chapters 7 and 8, on color and TV system design, respectively, are entirely new.