Image processing is a hands-on discipline, and the best way to learn is by doing. This text takes its motivation from medical applications and uses real medical images and situations to illustrate and clarify concepts and to build intuition, insight and understanding. Designed for advanced undergraduates and graduate students who will become end-users of digital image processing, it covers the basics of the major clinical imaging modalities, explaining how the images are produced and acquired. It then presents the standard image processing operations, focusing on practical issues and problem solving. Crucially, the book explains when and why particular operations are done, and practical computer-based activities show how these operations affect real images. All images, links to the public-domain software ImageJ and custom plug-ins, and selected solutions are available from www.cambridge.org/books/dougherty.
Geoff Dougherty has been teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in image processing and pattern recognition for more than 20 years. He pursues research in medical imaging, including work on bone quality markers for the onset of osteoporosis and tortuosity metrics for retinal blood vessels. He received a prestigious Fulbright Senior Scholarship in 2009, and undertook research at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia.
The motivation for writing his first book was to produce a user-friendly book with practical applications and only the necessary mathematics. Just the sort of text he wished had been available to him twenty years ago. He is very pleased to hear that the book is being translated into Korean!
