Customer Reviews

Fundamentals of Digital Image Processing

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3 star:		(1)
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This book probably has all the information you need to know about digital image processing. However, if you are new to the field, this book may be your worst nightmare: It is really difficult to read and understand. So, if you want to learn about digital image processing, buy an easy to read book -such as the one from Gonzales- and get this book as a reference book.

OK...let's address a few of the complaints about this book.

Disjoint: OK, maybe a bit. Image processing is really a group of techniques, not like basic mathematics where you learn to add first, then multiply. The progression is not necessarily linear. If you want to solve this problem with an image you learn this set of techniques, which are typically disjoint from other sets of techniques. However, its all there, everything.

Equations: Digital image processing requires mathematics. If you don't like it, then go find something else. The concepts are mathematical in nature. I think software people will find this more readable because of all the summations (more common to programmers than engineers sometimes).

Dated: I'm sure Dr Jain would like to update the book. Unfortunately he's dead. He died in 1988 (at the age of 42). The sure fact that this book was written before digital cameras were a big deal is really amazing to me. I was using this book in 2001-2003 for image processing, including class work, as well as some military research work.

I found that I could read this book, look at the diagrams and the mathematics and program the algorithms in Matlab. That's what I wanted from this book, for both class and work. It delivered. Heck, I liked it well enough that I consulted it for 1-dimensional signal processing info as well as two (i.e. images).

Be cautious when buying this book. There is a printing problem that results in the loss of dots. That means periods, primes, decimals, the dot on a semicolon, etc. Not all are missing, but this is a mathematics book. This is utterly inexcusable and the publisher should never have distributed a book in this condition. Basic proof reading would have caught the error when converting from old technology to new.
My professor says the hardback doesn't have the same problem. (I'm in the market if you've got one.) I returned my copy to the bookstore for a refund.

A good book for a variety of people, novice or advanced. Mathematically very well organized. References and bibliography well structured, for each section, giving freedom to explore the ideas.

This is an excellent and comprehensive book about image processing. Its name is misleading - this is not an introductory book, although it covers all the needed mathematical background. However, this is one of the most valuable books in this field to be handy on your book shelf.

This is not a book you can use to rigourously learn the fundamentals of image processing. It's a good reference book for the techniques, giving formulas and some hand waving to accompany them - little is motivated, ir doesn't flow, is more a compendium of techniques used in the field accompanied by some text just to make the formulas less dry : the format formula/paragraph is repeated throughout; everything is treated at the same level hence the disjointed structure that doesn't flow. Low on rigourous analysis; may be good as a collection of magazine articles but fails as a textbook on fundamentals - reading this book you'll know the how but it won't help you grasp the why.

This book is really a mess organizationally speaking. The details are all there, and if you already know what you're doing you can usually find everything you need to know about a particular image processing algorithm and its supporting mathematics. It really is a one stop shop for not only image processing algorithms but algorithms on compression, computer vision, pattern recognition, and some advanced topics. The book is very terse in its directions and you must already know what you are trying to accomplish and why. There is no guidance on why things work and under what circumstances you would apply certain transforms to produce particular imaging results. This makes it a disaster for students.

Instead, for students I suggest "Digital Image Processing" just recently published in its third edition by Rafael C. Gonzalez. That book starts from the beginning and carefully shows specific image processing tasks, what transforms work, and why they work. Gonzalez' book also talks about pattern recognition and its relation to image processing in a very accessible fashion.

Unless you're a math god, reading this book will be an exercise in pain. The author avoids English exposition like the plague, relying on complex compound math equations and notation whenever possible (and especially when it's impossible).

Jain approaches image processing as a rarified form of 2-D signal processing rather than as its own subject, making this text perhaps more useful to theorists and researchers, but much less useful to practitioners. It's also 20 years old, so implementation is not exactly its forte. If you want to learn HOW to process images, look elsewhere. (For that, I recommend the Matlab version of Gonzalez, Woods, cowritten by Mathworks' Eddins.) Digital Image Processing Using MATLAB(R)

Likewise, for a much more readable and practical book, look to Gonzalez and Woods, esp the third edition, which unlike Jain, tries hard to provide the necessary foundation and exposition for readers without expertise in DSP and matrix algebra. Overall, G&W is a far superior book (and 20 years more up-to-date). Digital Image Processing (3rd Edition)