Image analysis is one of the most challenging areas in today's computer sci- ence, and image technologies are used in a host of applications. This book concentrates on image textures and presents novel techniques for their sim- ulation, retrieval, and segmentation using specific Gibbs random fields with multiple pairwise interaction between signals as probabilistic image models. These models and techniques were developed mainly during the previous five years (in relation to April 1999 when these words were written). While scanning these pages you may notice that, in spite of long equa- tions,...