Handbook of Mathematical Models in Computer Vision

Abstract Biological vision is a rather fascinating domain of research. Scientists of various origins like biology, medicine, neurophysiology, engineering, math­ ematics, etc. aim to understand the processes leading to visual perception process and at reproducing such systems. Understanding the environment is most of the time done through visual perception which appears to be one of the most fundamental sensory abilities in humans and therefore a significant amount of research effort has been dedicated towards modelling and repro­ ducing human visual abilities. Mathematical methods play a central role in this endeavour. Introduction David Marr's theory v^as a pioneering step tov^ards understanding visual percep­ tion. In his view human vision was based on a complete surface reconstruction of the environment that was then used to address visual subtasks. This approach was proven to be insufficient by neuro-biologists and complementary ideas from statistical pattern recognition and artificial intelligence were introduced to bet­ ter address the visual perception problem. In this framework visual perception is represented by a set of actions and rules connecting these actions. The emerg­ ing concept of active vision consists of a selective visual perception paradigm that is basically equivalent to recovering from the environment the minimal piece information required to address a particular task of interest.

Visual perception refers to the ability of understanding the visual information that is provided by the environment. Such a mechanism integrates several human abilities and was studied by many researchers with different scientific origins including philosophy, physiology, biology, neurobiology, mathematics and engineering. In particular in the recent years an effort to understand, formalize and finally reproduce mechanical visual perception systems able to see and understand the environment using computational theories was made by mathematicians, statisticians and engineers. Such a task connects visual tasks with optimization processes and the answer to the visual perception task corresponds to the lowest potential of a task-driven objective function. In this edited volume we present the most prominent mathematical models that are considered in computational vision. To this end, tasks of increasing complexity are considered and we present the state-of-the-art methods to cope with such tasks. The volume consists of six thematic areas that provide answers to the most dominant questions of computational vision:

Image reconstruction,

Segmentation and object extraction,

Shape modeling and registration,

Motion analysis and tracking,

3D from images, geometry and reconstruction

Applications in medical image analysis