SIGMM Education Column: Practical Image and Video Processing Using MATLAB

SIGMM Education Column of this issue highlights a new book titled "Practical Image and Video Processing Using MATLAB", which provides a practical introduction to the most important topics in image and video processing, using MATLAB® (and its Image Processing Toolbox) as a tool to demonstrate relevant techniques and algorithms. The book is written by Prof. Oge Marques of Florida Atlantic University and it is published by Wiley-IEEE press.

This book was motivated by the lack of an introductory text that covered the basics of image and video processing using MATLAB® in a single volume, and therefore it focuses on providing a practical perspective the reader to develop working projects. It adopts a "just enough math" philosophy, which favors the computational, algorithmic, and conceptual aspects of the techniques described along the book, over excessive mathematical formalism.

As a result, the book should appeal not only to its original target audience when used as a textbook (namely, upper-level undergraduate and early graduate students in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and related courses), but also to researchers and practitioners who have access to MATLAB®, solid computing/programming skills, and want to teach themselves the fundamentals of image and video processing.

The book has been organized in two parts. Part I: Image Processing, begins with an overview of the field, then introduces the fundamental concepts, notation, and terminology associated with image representation and basic image processing operations. Next, it discusses MATLAB® and its Image Processing Toolbox with the start of a series of chapters with hands-on activities and step-by-step tutorials. These chapters cover image acquisition and digitization, arithmetic logic, and geometric operations; image enhancement techniques; image filtering techniques; image restoration; mathematical morphology; edge detection techniques; image segmentation; image compression and coding; and feature extraction and representation. Part II: Video Processing, presents the main concepts and terminology associated with analog video signals and systems, as well as digital video formats and standards. It then describes the technically involved problem of standards conversion, discusses motion estimation and compensation techniques, shows how video sequences can be filtered, and concludes with an example of solution to object detection and tracking in video sequences using MATLAB®.

In addition, there are two appendices in this book. Appendix A presents selected aspects of the human visual system that bear implications in the design of image and video processing systems. Appendix B provides a tutorial on how to develop Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) in MATLAB®.

The book's companion website (http://www.ogemarques.com/) contains additional resources, such as: source code for all tutorials in the book and associated figures, sample materials and resources for instructors who adopt the textbook, an expanded and updated list of useful online resources organized by chapter, a forum which encourages discussions and exchanges among readers of the book and a blog, that is used to keep track of updates to the website as well as relevant posts on technical topics related to the book.