Learning an intricate subject such as digital image processing can be a quite of a difficult expedition to undertake. The student should have a firm background in mathematics. He/she should have taken a number of different pre-requisite courses in mathematics and signal processing before even being considered eligible to study image processing. Raafael C. Gonzalez, however, makes that task easy for the student. Digital Image Processing by Gonzales is a book written for the maths shy student. It assumes that the student would have little mathematical background. In so many ways this book can be compared favorably with the one written by Richard G. Lyons on digital Signal Processing i.e. Understanding Digital Signal Processing. In a metaphorical sense these books can be considered cousins of each other for two closely related subjects.
After preparing the student with initial background material in the first two chapters, the authors illustrates a few spatial domain image treatments. In the first two chapter concepts such as linearity, pixel distance measures, spatial versus greyscale resolution, and shrinking and zooming are described. Chapter 3 discusses image enhancement in the spatial domain. Topics such as contrast enhancement, histogram matching, histogram processing, equalization etc. are explained.
Chapter 4 is about frequency domain transformation and processing. The author explains the 2-D Fourier transform. In my opinion, this is the best part of the book. The explanation of Fourier transform is not only lucid, it gives key insights into how the whole transformation of image from the spatial domain to the frequency domain is realized. This is done in a step by step manner so the reader may fully grasp the inner workings of the otherwise quite enigmatic Fourier transform. Moreover, it is explained how filtering can take place with the Fourier transform.
The subsequent chapters discuss more advanced topics such as image restoration and color image processing techniques, image compression. Lossy and lossless methods of compression are discussed.
Overall the book is quite fun to read and it makes the reader enthusiastic about the subject of image processing. Although it is assumed that the reader has some familiarity with calculus and linear algebra, it is still a very good resource for almost any student from any background interested in studying digital image processing.
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