Vision with Direction

This introductory textbook presents the modern signal processing concepts used in computer vision and image analysis in a systematic and mathematically coherent way. For the first time in a textbook on image processing, single direction, group direction, corners and edges, Hough transform, and motion estimation are developed in a principled way using direction tensors as the unifying concept.

The topics presented include Hilbert spaces, the Fourier transform, scale analysis, direction fields, structure tensors, motion tensors, the Hough transform, grouping, and segmentation. Directional signal processing, an increasingly crucial element of computer vision for which neural circuits exist in human vision, is dealt with in depth by use of tensors. All chapters are richly illustrated, with color graphics from cover to cover; applications are studied in various fields, including biometric person authentication, texture analysis, optical character recognition, and motion estimation and tracking; and exercises help the sudent verify progress.

Developed out of courses given by the author, this introductory textbook addresses advanced undergarduates as well as master and PhD students in computer science, engineering, mathematics, and in other disciplines where techniques from computer vision, image processing, visual computation and signal analysis are applied.

A fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IEEE) and the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), Josef Bigun obtained his Ms and Ph.D. degrees from Linkoping University, Sweden, in 1983 and 1988 respectively. In 1988, he joined the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne where he worked as Adjoint Scientifique until 1998 with the exception that in 1997 he was a visiting professor at the Royal Institute of Technology, (KTH) Stockholm. He has been elected professor to the Signal Analysis Chair, his current position, at Halmstad University and Chalmers Institute of Technology in 1998.

He has been in technical and organizational committees of numerous national and international conferences. In particular, he co-chaired the First International Conference on Audio and Video Based Person Authentication in 1997. He has been contributing as a referee or as an editorial board member of international journals including Pattern Recognition Letters and IEEE Image Processing. He has contributed to the initiation and progress of several national and international research projects in computer vision, in particular in biometric person authentication, e.g. the EU projects IT-VIRSBS, ACTS-M2VTS, NOE-BIOSECURE.