Introduction

Abstract

Digital images are now present in many human activities. One can cite for example medical diagnostic, artificial vision for automatic inspection, remote sensing for earth monitoring, robotic applications, telecommunications, scientific instrumentation for astronomy or biological research, military optoelectronic, and radar surveillance systems. The tremendous development of these fields of application requires the design of appropriate digital image processing techniques since the amount and the rate of data are often incompatible with human intervention. Many different reasons can be put forward in order to explain this situation. Two of them are of prime importance for the subject of this book: the progress, the diversity, and the diffusion of different imaging sensors and the increase of the computational power of digital processors.