Excerpts from book:

Machine vision is a multi-disciplinary subject, utilizing techniques drawn from optics, electronics, mechanical engineering, computer science, and artificial intelligence. This book is intended to be an in-depth introduction to Machine Vision which will allow the reader quickly to assimilate and comprehend the essentials of this evolving and fascinating topic.

Significant emphasis will be placed on providing the reader with a solid grounding in the fundamental tools for image acquisition, processing, and analysis; a range of techniques, dealing with very simple two dimensional systems, through more sophisticated robust two-dimensional approaches, to the current state of the art in three-dimensional robot vision, will be explained in some detail. Both application areas of automated visual inspection and robot vision are addressed. Recognizing that machine vision is just a component of a larger automation system, a brief introduction to robot programming will be provided, together with an explanation of the mechanisms by which robot vision modules interact with the programming language.

The book is directed at final-year undergraduate and first-year graduate students in computer science and engineering, and at practising industrial engineers; the fundamental philosophy being to impart sufficient knowledge so that the reader will be competent to begin the implementation of a simple vision system and to enable him/her to study each issue independently in more depth. To that end, care is taken to provide adequate references to supporting texts, reports, and research papers. In this way the book may be viewed both as a self-contained introductory text and as a spring-board to more detailed and specific study.