Image analysis is a computational feat which humans show excellence in, in comp- ison with computers. Yet the list of applications that rely on automatic processing of images has been growing at a fast pace. Biometric authentication by face, ?ngerprint, and iris, online character recognition in cell phones as well as drug design tools are but a few of its benefactors appearing on the headlines. This is, of course, facilitated by the valuable output of the resarch community in the past 30 years. The pattern recognition and computer vision communities that study image analysis have large conferences, which regularly draw 1000 parti- pants. In a way this is not surprising, because much of the human-speci?c activities critically rely on intelligent use of vision. If routine parts of these activities can be automated, much is to be gained in comfort and sustainable development. The - search ?eld could equally be called visualintelligence because it concerns nearly all activities of awake humans. Humans use or rely on pictures or pictorial languages to represent, analyze, and develop abstract metaphors related to nearly every aspect of thinking and behaving, be it science, mathematics, philosopy, religion, music, or emotions. The present volume is an introductory textbook on signal analysis of visual c- putation for senior-level undergraduates or for graduate students in science and - gineering. My modest goal has been to present the frequently used techniques to analyze images in a common framework–directional image processing.
A fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IEEE) and the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), Josef Bigun obtained his Ms and Ph.D. degrees from Linkoping University, Sweden, in 1983 and 1988 respectively. In 1988, he joined the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne where he worked as Adjoint Scientifique until 1998 with the exception that in 1997 he was a visiting professor at the Royal Institute of Technology, (KTH) Stockholm. He has been elected professor to the Signal Analysis Chair, his current position, at Halmstad University and Chalmers Institute of Technology in 1998.
He has been in technical and organizational committees of numerous national and international conferences. In particular, he co-chaired the First International Conference on Audio and Video Based Person Authentication in 1997. He has been contributing as a referee or as an editorial board member of international journals including Pattern Recognition Letters and IEEE Image Processing. He has contributed to the initiation and progress of several national and international research projects in computer vision, in particular in biometric person authentication, e.g. the EU projects IT-VIRSBS, ACTS-M2VTS, NOE-BIOSECURE.
