Customer Reviews

Machine Vision Algorithms in Java: Techniques and Implementation

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This is a good book on algorithms in machine vision, not computer vision. It is important that you know the difference before you buy this book. Machine vision is used in manufacturing plants for detecting the parts according to your needs. On the other hand, computer vision is integrated into AI where you can create vision input for your robotics or AI system.

That's why this book is good for those who wants to create Photoshop-like effects or implement systems for part analysis. If you are looking for something related with robotics, look for elsewhere.

There are better books on Java imaging and better books on machine vision. However, where this book stands out is in its catalogue of machine vision algorithms. The book is really a vehicle for the author's machine vision application, complete with user interface, entitled "NeatVision". You can download it off the web complete with a developer's guide on how to extend the application. There's really nothing unique about the built-in transforms. If you are already familiar with computer vision- and you should be if you buy this book- you will most likely already have heard of most of them. What it does enable you to do is to chain transforms together to perform larger more complex machine vision tasks.
As for the book itself, the first chapter is a forgettable overview of machine vision, and the second chapter is an equally forgettable chapter on Java and imaging in Java. Chapters three through six comprise the meat of the book. These chapters talk about the specific algorithms for machine vision transformations divided into the categories of general machine vision techniques, morphology, texture analysis, and color analysis. Chapter seven switches gears and talks about the author's full visual application, Neatvision. Details are given on how to use and and to extend the application. The appendices are about NeatVision's graphic file formats, API specification, and visual interface components respectively. My advice to the potential buyer of this book is to visit the application's website, and if you find NeatVision very interesting you will find the book valuable. I would type the address into this review myself, but Amazon usually kicks out reviews with web addresses in them. The search engine keyword is just "NeatVision".

If you need to learn and apply machine vision techniques this is a good place to start.