Customer Reviews

Image Processing Handbook The: Second Edition

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This book reads like a user manual for an engineering image processing toolkit. In fact, that is exactly what it is -- the author sells a companion CD that is a set of image processing plug-ins to PhotoShop. However, you will not need to buy his toolkit to find this book valuable. Any image processing package that you use will be of greater use to you if you have this book at your side. The important thing to realize is that this is a handbook for technical USERS. It is not a programming manual for how to implement the techniques it discusses, but a very high-quality discussion of what the techniques are and when and why you would use them. Within that domain, the book has remarkable depth and clarity. It is quite up-to-date in its coverage, and draws extensively from real-world applications in medicine, microscopy, and satellite imaging. If you need to develop image processing procedures in your work as an engineer, you will want to have this book by your side.

If you are primarily interested in remote sensing aspects of image processing (e.g., satellite and airborne imagery of the ground). I recommend acquiring this handbook on image processing. By far the best handbook on general Image Processing is "The Image Processing Handbook" edited by Russ and published by the IEEE. I use this book all the time. Of course, if you are getting into specific areas, such as mapping, hyperspectral imagery, synthetic aperature radar imagery or photogrammetry (i.e., precise physical measurement from imagery), or if you have a specific application (such as deforestation or plant diseases or agriculture), you should consider separate books on those topics.

John Russ' book on image processing was never intended to be a textbook on how to understand and write your own image processing algorithms, as you might believe by looking through the table of contents. It does cover just about everything you would see in such a textbook, but from a user's standpoint of these operations, not as an author of image processing code who needs to understand the algorithms behind these operations. Instead, Russ explains all of the operations, their value in various applications, and provides many illustrations showing before and after pictures of what each operation does. There are no algorithms, pseudocode, or mathematics in this book.

The jewel in the crown of this book is the companion CD. It contains over 200 Photoshop plug-ins for performing the operations mentioned in this book. These plug-ins work on 8-bit grayscale and 24 bit RGB images and are divided into the categories of image adjustment, color manipulation, image math, boolean operations, Fourier processing, morphological operations, neighborhood processing, distance-map operations, thresholding, feature measurement, calibration, stereology, and surface rendering. The bad news is that you have to obtain the CD separately. If you need to understand the detailed mathematics behind such operations, you might consult Digital Image Processing by Gonzalez and Woods, and then come back to this book for the tools to accomplish the operations explained in that book. The updates to this fifth edition include an additional chapter on human vision and how it ties into image processing. Also, the author has updated his sections on image acquisition hardware and software to describe the latest tools available. Finally, the topic of tomographic imaging has been expanded and given its own chapter and the chapter on 3-D image acquisition has been deleted.

This is an excellent book on image processing from a systems engineering and user standpoint. You will be disappointed if you expect to learn the algorithms behind the techniques demonstrated in this book.

I bought this book thinking I would find useful equations illustrated with examples. That was a mistake. The book is more an introduction to concepts in image processing than a handbook.

I would recommend it to users or beginners in image processing who want to familiarize themselves with image processing concepts. The content is light and accessible.

However I would definitely not recommend this book for experts, researchers or engineers.

As others have stated, this book comes as close as you'll ever get to a single-source reference on image processing. But if I were ever going to shoot anything down in it, I'd say that a little more mathematical background on some topics (and maybe pseudocoded examples) would help. For example, in the satellite geometric correction section, only a very high level view is given yet this is a challenging topic that could use more depth. Geometric transformations in general could use more depth, e.g. camera calibrations or image warping/morphing/mapping to other projections for example. Another example would be the need for a little more depth on how to make slow algorithms fast ...like convolution multiplications for example. Sure, you could write out the multiplies and spot commonalities, then re-use results that appear in more than one subsequent equation and what not, but some exploration of matrix math and how to make it efficient would be nice. But again ...I'm picking at small things here, and if John's book covered everything that I'd like it to, then it would become 2 books, not one ...hey! Now THERE's an idea! A 2+ book set by John Russ that covers a broader range of topics and does so in greater depth! That's something that I'd pay for (and much better to read than Ballard & Brown)

I am a biologist with a little background in math. Using this book and matlab I could quickly implement basic feature recognition tools to analyze microscope images. The book focuses on concepts and explains them in intuitive language rather than in mathematical terms. Overall, it worked perfectly for me, but could be over-simplying for people with technical background.

This, the fifth edition of this industry standard reference book on image processing has been significantly expanded. There are some 600 new and revised images. A major feature of the new edition is to describe the new advances that have come about in hardware for image capture and printing. This includes both new versions of traditional equipment and new emerging technologies. The text has been expanded in areas like deconvolution, extended-dynamic-range images and multichannel imaging including principal-components analysis.

In general this book does not cover the background mathematics that enables image processing. Those are left to specialty books on the subject. Instead this book is intended to be used in conjunction with hands-on equipment where the reader is encouraged to experiment with different methods to determine what is needed for the particular job.

While suitable for use as a text, this book is really a handbook for technical users. The book is more oriented to what the various tools availavle to help actually do.

Over the years I have done a lot of image processing in unusual areas, analyzing laser speckle is an example. This book has proven very useful in introducing image processing concepts to make my use of image processing software more well founded. I don't write code but the book covers such a broad range of techniques that it would be a good place to start for someone who is trying to create software but is not an image processing professional. It shows a variety of approaches to a given problem. I have an earlier edition but have discussed the present edition with my son to whom I gave a copy.

I love this book, i been reading it and using it as a great tool, it is awesome how easy can i learn some of the stuff, great book

The book covers every aspect of video in a technical atmosphere. It provides great insight and understanding in the field of video. I use this book as a reference and refresher when I work with video.