Preface

One of the major changes instituted at the 2001 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) in Kauai, Hawaii, was the replacement of the traditional tutorial sessions with a set of short courses. The topics of these short courses were carefully chosen to reflect the diversity in computer vision and represent very promising areas. The response was a very pleasant surprise, with sometimes more than 200 people attending a single short course. This overwhelming response was the inspiration for this book.

There are three parts in this book. The first part covers some of the more fundamental aspects of computer vision, the second describes a few interesting applications, and the third details specific approaches to facilitate programming for computer vision. This book is not intended to be a comprehensive coverage of computer vision; it can, however, be used as a complement to most computer vision textbooks.

We would like to thank all the contributors for all their hard work, and Bernard Goodwin for his support and enthusiasm for our book project.

Gérard Medioni, University of Southern California
Sing Bing Kang, Microsoft Research
June, 2004