Computer vision is probably the most exciting branch of image processing, and the number of applications in robotics, automation technology and quality control is constantly increasing. Unfortunately entering this research area is, as yet, not simple.

Those who are interested must first go through a lot of books, publications and software libraries. With this book, however, the first step is easy. The theoretically founded content is understandable and is supplemented by many practical examples. Source code is provided with the specially developed platform-independent open source library IVT in the programming language C/C++. The use of the IVT is not necessary, but it does make for a much easier entry and allows first developments to be quickly produced.

The authorship is made up of research assistants of the chair of Professor Ruediger Dillmann at the Institut für Technische Informatik (ITEC), Universitaet Karlsruhe (TH). Having gained extensive experience in image processing in many research and industrial projects, they are now passing this knowledge on.

Among other subjects, the following are dealt with in the fundamentals section of the book: Lighting, optics, camera technology, transfer standards, camera calibration, image enhancement, segmentation, filters, correlation and stereo vision.

The practical section provides the efficient implementation of the algorithms, followed by many interesting applications such as interior surveillance, bar code scanning, object recognition, 3-D scanning, 3-D tracking, a stereo camera system and much more.