Foundations of Computer Vision

Summary

The print version was published by The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England Preface Dedicated to all the pixels. About this Book This book covers foundational topics within computer vision, with an image processing and machine learning perspective. We want to build the reader’s intuition and so we include many visualizations. The audience is undergraduate and graduate students who are entering the field, but we hope experienced practitioners will find the book valuable as well. Our initial goal was to write a large book that provided a good coverage of the field. Unfortunately, the field of computer vision is just too large for that. So, we decided to write a small book instead, limiting each chapter to no more than five pages. Such a goal forced us to really focus on the important concepts necessary to understand each topic. Writing a short book was perfect because we did not have time to write a long book and you did not have time to read it. Unfortunately, we have failed at that goal, too. Writing this Book To appreciate the path we took to write this book, let’s look at some data first. shows the number of pages written as a function of time since we mentioned the idea to MIT press for the first time on November 24, 2010. Figure 1: Evolution of the number of pages written as a function of time. Starting to write this book was like entering this cave. We had no idea what we were getting into. Writing this book has not been a linear process. As the plot shows, the evolution of the manuscript length is non-monotonic, with a period when the book shrank before growing again. Lots of things have happened since we started thinking about this book in November 2010; yes, it has taken us more than 10 years to write this book. If we knew on the first day all the work that is involved in writing a book like this one there is no way we would have started. However, from today’s vantage point, with most of the work behind us, we feel happy we started this journey...