[...]... and necessary sciences Fig 1.1 An image containing three children T.B Moeslund, Introduction to Video and Image Processing, Undergraduate Topics in Computer Science, DOI 10.1007/97 8-1 -4 47 1-2 50 3-7 _1, © Springer-Verlag London Limited 2012 1 2 1 Introduction Some of the first applications of digital video and image processing were to improve the quality of the captured images, but as the power of computers... many systems working with video and images Even though this book is titled: Video and Image Processing it also covers basic methods from Image Manipulation and Image Analysis in order to provide the reader with a solid foundation for understanding and working with images and video 1.2 General Framework No matter which category you are working within (except for Video and Image Compression) you can... and live video, e.g., weather forecast), biometrics (to measure some unique parameters of a person), photo editing (improving the quality or adding effects to photographs), etc Many of these applications rely on the same video and image processing methods, and it is these basic methods which are the focus of this book 1.1 The Different Flavors of Video and Image Processing The different video and image. .. of applications where video and image processing could make a difference Today, video and image processing are used in many diverse applications, such as astronomy (to enhance the quality), medicine (to measure and understand some parameters of the human body, e.g., blood flow in fractured veins), image compression (to reduce the memory requirement when storing an image) , sports (to capture the motion... Color Images So far we have restricted ourselves to gray-scale images, but, as you might have noticed, the real world consists of colors Going back some years, many cameras (and displays, e.g., TV-monitors) only handled gray-scale images As the technology matured, it became possible to capture (and visualize) color images and today most cameras capture color images In this chapter we turn to the topic... an image, e.g., rotation 11 Visual Effects This chapters shows how video and image processing can be used to create visual effects 12 + 13 Application Examples In these chapters concrete examples of video processing systems are presented The purpose of these chapters is twofold Firstly to put some of the presented methods into a context and secondly to provide inspiration for what video and image processing. .. organization and topics of the different chapters in this book # Title Topics 2 Image Acquisition This chapter describes what light is and how a camera can capture the light and convert it into an image 3 Color Images This chapter describes what color images are and how they can be represented 4 Point Processing This chapter presents some of the basic image manipulation methods for understanding and improving... thousand words” So, our eyes and our brain are capable of extracting detailed information far beyond what can be described in text, and it is this ability we want to replicate in the “seeing computer” To this end a camera replaces the eyes and the (video and image) processing software replaces the human brain The purpose of this book is to present the basics within these two topics; cameras and video/ image. .. video/ image processing Cameras have been around for many years and were initially developed with the purpose of “freezing” a part of the world, for example to be used in newspapers For a long time cameras were analog, meaning that the video and images were captured on film As digital technology matured, the possibility of digital video and images arose, and video and image processing became relevant and necessary... where processing of digital video and/ or images is used 2 Image Acquisition Before any video or image processing can commence an image must be captured by a camera and converted into a manageable entity This is the process known as image acquisition The image acquisition process consists of three steps; energy reflected from the object of interest, an optical system which focuses the energy and finally . images arose, and video and image processing became relevant and necessary sciences. Fig. 1.1 An image containing three children T .B. Moeslund, Introduction to Video and Image Processing, Undergraduate Topics. 97 8-1 -4 47 1-2 50 2-0 e-ISBN 97 8-1 -4 47 1-2 50 3-7 DOI 10.1007/97 8-1 -4 47 1-2 50 3-7 Springer London Dordrecht Heidelberg New York British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is. volumes: http://www.springer.com/series/7592 Thomas B. Moeslund Introduction to Video and Image Processing Building Real Systems and Applications Thomas B. Moeslund Visual Analysis of People Laboratory Department of Architecture,