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...

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...