Introduction to Computer Vision

Computer vision as a field is an intellectual frontier. Like any frontier it is exciting and disorganized and there is often no reliable authority to appeal to. Many useful ideas have no theoretical grounding and some theories are useless in practice; developed areas are widely scattered and often one looks completely inaccessible from the other. Nevertheless we have attempted in this book to present a fairly orderly picture of the field. We see computer vision—or just “vision”; apologies to those who study human or animal vision—as an enterprise that uses statistical methods to disentangle data using models constructed with the aid of geometry physics and learning theory.