Recommended books for learning image processing and computer vision

This is a brief comment for anyone interested in learning how to do image processing and computer vision. It seems that some of the books mentioned here have some sort of free online version, so you may want to do a search before you buy.

Image processing is a big subject. But if you’re interested in image processing and stuff like neural networks, books about Computer Vision will apply image processing, exposing areas you may want to focus on. Learning OpenCV describes algorithms briefly and applies them. Computer Vision: Dana H. Ballard, Christopher M. Brown: 9780131653160: Amazon.com: Books is a bit old these days, but very nice. There’s a free online version, too.

Getting back to pure image processing, perhaps the most important technique is filtering, using convolution, so you’d probably want to be comfortable with that early on. The Fourier Transform allows you to view your images in the “frequency domain”, where am image is really a sum of waves whose amplitudes add in bright areas, and cancel each other in dark areas. Sharp edges are crafted by summing high frequency waves. So smoothing involves eliminating the high frequencies, and so on. You may never need to work in the frequency domain, but it’s good to know about it. For me, it is not easy to grok, but the insights are worth the effort (and for large filters, FFT is quicker).

For pure image processing, Digital Image Processing: Kenneth R. Castleman: 9780132114677: Amazon.com: Books is something of a classic (I think—I’ve had it for a long time), also has some sort of free online version. Likewise, Digital Image Processing: PIKS Scientific Inside: William K. Pratt: 9780471767770: Amazon.com: Books (I have a 1991 edition). Pratt and Castleman get very detailed, and get deep in the weeds, if you need that. There’s also Fundamentals of Digital Image Processing: Anil K. Jain: 9780133361650: Amazon.com: Books and Image Processing, Analysis, and Machine Vision: Milan Sonka, Vaclav Hlavac, Roger Boyle: 9780495082521: Amazon.com: Books, both beautiful books with lots of cool techniques covering a wide area. Browsing through these can give you ideas.

My copies are earlier editions, so they don’t go into the latest stuff. But the fundamentals don’t change much, anyway. I strongly recommend Python for your research because the feedback is immediate. There’s a website, PyImageSearch - Be awesome at learning OpenCV, Python, and computer vision which is extremely informative, with many examples in Python.