• Thienpont, Hugo

Abstract

In recent years, Moore's law has fostered the steady growth of the field of digital image processing, though computational complexity remains a significant problem for most of the digital image processing applications. In parallel, the research domain of optical image processing has also matured, potentially bypassing the problems digital approaches are facing and bringing in new applications. This book covers the fundamentals of optical and image processing techniques by integrating contributions from both research communities to enable resolving of bottlenecks that applications encounter nowadays, and to give rise to new applications. Therefore, this book, ''Optical and Digital Image Processing - Fundamentals and Applications,'' has a broad scope, since, besides focusing on joint research, it additionally aims at disseminating the knowledge existing in both domains. A precedent of the current book can be traced back to the mid-1980s when one of the coeditors (G. Cristobal) organized a series of annual courses on the topic of ''Optical and Digital Image Processing''. <br/>In 2008, a joint conference on optical and digital image processing was organized for the first time as part of the SPIE Photonics Europe meeting in Strasbourg. Later on in 2010, a second conference was organized at SPIE Photonics Europe in Brussels on the same topic. Image processing using optical or digital approaches aremature fields covered by many monographs.However, in the literature, a gap exists in terms of monographs that cover both domains. The current, interdisciplinary book is intended to be a <br/>valuable source reference to bridge the gap between the optical and digital worlds and to enable better communication between them. The artwork on the cover of this book serves as a good illustration of this idea. In addition to traditional aspects of optics and digital image processing, this book includes the state-of-the-art methods and techniques currently used by researchers as well as the most significant applications. It is necessary to emphasize that a book that covers both optical and digital domains including the fundamentals, the current state of the art, and a selected range of applications has not been published so far. <br/>The book has been structured in five different parts: <br/>*Chapters 1-4 introduce the basic concepts in optics, photonics, information theory, and digital image processing. <br/>*Chapters 5-17 include the basic methodologies and techniques that serve as the foundation upon which the remainder of the book has been built. <br/>*Chapter 18 serves as a bridge between the analog and digital image processing approaches. <br/>*Chapters 19-34 include a selection of themost representative applications following an optical and/or digital approach. In most of the cases, the editors'intention has been to illustrate how the different applications areas have been solved by optical, digital, or even hybrid optical-digital approaches. <br/>*Chapters 35-38 describe four hands-on projects allowing the reader to experiment with some of the described techniques. <br/>This book can be used as a textbook in a two-semester course on the topic,primarily in computer science and electrical engineering departments but also in physics and medicine. This book will be a valuable reference for physicists,engineers, computer scientists, and technologists, in general, due to its integration in a single monograph of information that is usually spread across many sources. <br/>For the reader's convenience, there is an accompanying website with supplementarymaterial at www.wiley-vch.de. It contains selected MATLAB codes, testing images, and errata.

Topics

• impedance spectroscopy
• theory
• experiment