Author: Uvais Qidwai & C.H. Chen
Publisher: Chapman & Hall/CRC
Pages: 314
ISBN: 978-1420079500
Aimed at: MATLAB users interested in image processing
Rating: 3.5
Pros: Covers a wide subject area
Cons: Lacks detailed explanations
Reviewed by: Harry Fairhead

Image processing is a topic that means different things to different people. This book covers a reasonably large area of the subject for there to be something for most readers. However, as the title makes clear, you do have to be interested in using the maths package MATLAB for it to be really worthwhile.

It is a fairly slim book and given that it covers such a wide range you can't expect it to be deep. Most of the topics covered are theoretically fairly simple but if they are slightly more complicated then the explanations provided are fairly unhelpful. To get much from the book you really need to know the ideas involved and simply want a refresher course or just some help with implementing the ideas in MATLAB.

The book starts off from the basics of image acquisition and simple image operations such as arithmetic. It then moves on to noise, image transformations  and filtering. Later chapters deal with image restoration, compression, edge detection, binary image processing, image classification, object tracking, face recognition and fuzzy logic approaches to images. The explanations are generally clear and they make the subject seem simple - but only by glossing over any deep theory.

This is not a masterwork on image processing but a quick skim over the surface detail with some Matlab code thrown in.