Advances in Image Understanding

This volume of original papers has been assembled to honor Azriel Rosenfeld, the dominant figure in the field of computer vision and image processing for over 30 years. Over this period he has made many fundamental and pioneering contributions to nearly every area in this field. Azriel Rosenfeld wrote the first textbook in the field (1969) and was founding editor of the first journal (1972).

The contributions in this book illustrate the changes that have occurred in dealing with crucial research problems and the methodologies employed to solve them. The 22 papers specifically written for this text are by a handful of researchers who have known and worked with Azriel over the years. These papers address five major themes: image segmentation, feature extraction, 3D shape estimation from 2D images, object recognition, and applications technologies.

Kevin W. Bowyer is the author of "Your Call," an ethics and computing column in Computer magazine, and served as chair of the Social, Ethical, Legal and Professional Issues focus group for the Year 2001 Model Curricula for Computing. He has also led workshops on Teaching Ethics and Computing for undergraduate faculty sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Currently, he is editor in chief of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and is a member of editorial boards for several other journals. Dr. Bowyer's research interests include image understanding, pattern recognition, and medical image analysis. His research work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Army Medical Research and Material Command, NASA, and other agencies. Presently, Dr. Bowyer is professor of computer science and engineering at the University of South Florida, where he has received numerous distinguished teaching awards. Previously, he was a computer science faculty member at Duke University and the Institute for Informatics at the Swiss Federal Technical Institute in Zurich. Dr. Bowyer is an IEEE Fellow.

Narendra Ahuja is a Research Professor in the Department. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Beckman Institute, and Coordinated Science Laboratory at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - UIUC -, and the Director of Information Technology Research Academy - ITRA -, a national initiative started by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India.