This edition first published 2014
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dictionary of computer vision and image processing / R. B. Fisher, T. P. Breckon,
K. Dawson-Howe, A. Fitzgibbon, C. Robertson, E. Trucco, C. K. I. Williams. – 2nd edition.
  pages cm
  Includes bibliographical references.
  ISBN 978-1-119-94186-6 (pbk.)
 1. Computer vision–Dictionaries. 2. Image processing–Dictionaries. I. Fisher, R. B.
  TA1634.I45 2014
  006.3′703–dc23

2013022869

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 9781119941866

From Bob to Rosemary,
Mies, Hannah, Phoebe
and Lars

From Toby to Alison, my
parents and Amy

From Ken to Jane,
William and Susie

From AWF to Liz, to my
parents, and again to D

From Craig to Karen,
Aidan and Caitlin

From Manuel to Emily,
Francesca, and Alistair

Preface

This dictionary arose out of a continuing interest in the resources needed by students and researchers in the fields of image processing, computer vision and machine vision (however you choose to define these overlapping fields). As instructors and mentors, we often found confusion about what various terms and concepts mean for the beginner. To support these learners, we have tried to define the key concepts that a competent generalist should know about these fields.

This second edition adds approximately 1000 new terms to the more than 2500 terms in the original dictionary. We have chosen new terms that have entered reasonably common usage (e.g., those which have appeared in the index of influential books) and terms that were not included originally. We are pleased to welcome Toby Breckon and Chris Williams into the authorial team and to thank Andrew Fitzgibbon and Manuel Trucco for all their help with the first edition.

One innovation in the second edition is the addition of reference links for a majority of the old and new terms. Unlike more traditional dictionaries, which provide references to establish the origin or meaning of the word, our goal here was instead to provide further information about the term.

Another innovation is to include a few videos for the electronic version of the dictionary.

This is a dictionary, not an encyclopedia, so the definitions are necessarily brief and are not intended to replace a proper textbook explanation of the term. We have tried to capture the essentials of the terms, with short examples or mathematical precision where feasible or necessary for clarity.

Further information about many of the terms can be found in the references. Many of the references are to general textbooks, each providing a broad view of a portion of the field. Some of the concepts are quite recent; although commonly used in research publications, they may not yet have appeared in mainstream textbooks. Subsequently, this book is also a useful source for recent terminology and concepts. Some concepts are still missing from the dictionary, but we have scanned textbooks and the research literature to find the central and commonly used terms.

The dictionary was intended for beginning and intermediate students and researchers, but as we developed the dictionary it was clear that we also had some confusions and vague understandings of the concepts. It surprised us that some terms had multiple usages. To improve quality and coverage, each definition was reviewed during development by at least two people besides its author. We hope that this has caught any errors and vagueness, as well as providing alternative meanings. Each of the co-authors is quite experienced in the topics covered here, but it was still educational to learn more about our field in the process of compiling the dictionary. We hope that you find using the dictionary equally valuable.

To help the reader, terms appearing elsewhere in the dictionary are underlined in the definitions. We have tried to be reasonably thorough about this, but some terms, such as 2D, 3D, light, camera, image, pixel, and color were so commonly used that we decided not to cross-reference all of them.

We have tried to be consistent with the mathematical notation: italics for scalars (s), arrowed italics for points and vectors , and bold for matrices (M).

The authors would like to thank Xiang (Lily) Li, Georgios Papadimitriou, and Aris Valtazanos for their help with finding citations for the content from the first edition. We also greatly appreciate all the support from the John Wiley & Sons editorial and production team!

It is also our pleasure to introduce a new feature that appears in the Enhanced Ebook version of the dictionary - videos. In order to make clearer some of the terms and effects, 59 videos have been attached to the terms, such as for the terms ‘automated visual surveillance’ and ‘chroma keying‘. We hope that these videos will increase the value of the dictionary.

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