Stochastic Image Processing provides the first thorough treatment of Markov and hidden Markov random fields and their application to image processing. Although promoted as a promising approach for over thirty years, it has only been in the past few years that the theory and algorithms have developed to the point of providing useful solutions to old and new problems in image processing. Markov random fields are a multidimensional extension of Markov chains, but the generalization is complicated by the lack of a natural ordering of pixels in multidimensional spaces. Hidden...

In the current age of information technology, the issues of distributing and utilizing images efficiently and effectively are of substantial concern. Solutions to many of the problems arising from these issues are provided by techniques of image processing, among which segmentation and compression are topics of this book.
Image segmentation is a process for dividing an image into its constituent parts. For block-based segmentation using statistical classification, an image is divided into blocks and a feature vector is formed for each block by grouping statistics of its pixel...

Source coding theory has as its goal the characterization of the optimal performance achievable in idealized communication systems which must code an information source for transmission over a digital communication or storage channel for transmission to a user. The user must decode the information into a form that is a good approximation to the original. A code is optimal within some class if it achieves the best possible fidelity given whatever constraints are imposed on the code by the available channel. In theory, the primary constraint imposed on a code by the channel is its rate or...

Herb Caen, a popular columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, recently quoted a Voice of America press release as saying that it was reorganizing in order to "eliminate duplication and redundancy. " This quote both states a goal of data compression and illustrates its common need: the removal of duplication (or redundancy) can provide a more efficient representation of data and the quoted phrase is itself a candidate for such surgery. Not only can the number of words in the quote be reduced without losing informa tion, but the statement would actually be enhanced by such compression since...

The Fourier transform is one of the most important mathematical tools in a wide variety of fields in science and engineering. In the abstract it can be viewed as the transformation of a signal in one domain (typically time or space) into another domain, the frequency domain. Applications of Fourier transforms, often called Fourier analysis or harmonic analysis, provide useful decompositions of signals into fundamental or "primitive" components, provide shortcuts to the computation of complicated sums and integrals, and often reveal hidden structure in data. Fourier analysis lies at the base...

Toeplitz and Circulant Matrices: A review derives in a tutorial manner the fundamental theorems on the asymptotic behavior of eigenvalues, inverses, and products of banded Toeplitz matrices and Toeplitz matrices with absolutely summable elements. Mathematical elegance and generality are sacrificed for conceptual simplicity and insight in the hope of making these results available to engineers lacking either the background or endurance to attack the mathematical literature on the subject. By limiting the generality of the matrices considered, the essential ideas and results can be conveyed in...

This volume describes the essential tools and techniques of statistical signal processing. At every stage, theoretical ideas are linked to specific applications in communications and signal processing. The book begins with an overview of basic probability, random objects, expectation, and second-order moment theory, followed by a wide variety of examples of the most popular random process models and their basic uses and properties. Specific applications to the analysis of random signals and systems for communicating, estimating, detecting, modulating, and other processing of signals are...

In December 1974 the first realtime conversation on the ARPAnet took place between Culler-Harrison Incorporated in Goleta, California, and MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts. This was the first successful application of realtime digital speech communication over a packet network and an early milestone in the explosion of realtime signal processing of speech, audio, images, and video that we all take for granted today. It could be considered as the first voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), except that the Internet Protocol (IP) had not yet been established. In fact, the...

In the current age of information technology, the issues of distributing and utilizing images efficiently and effectively are of substantial concern. Solutions to many of the problems arising from these issues are provided by techniques of image processing, among which segmentation and compression are topics of this book.
Image segmentation is a process for dividing an image into its constituent parts. For block-based segmentation using statistical classification, an image is divided into blocks and a feature vector is formed for each block by grouping statistics of its pixel...