Digital Image Processing: Principles and Applications

This older book is an excellent gentle introduction to digital image processing for those who have not yet had calculus, or for those who want to understand the basics before taking on the more daunting task of reading and understanding something like Gonzales & Woods, which is the standard graduate image processing text. The book begins with the basics of the various color spaces and how images are perceived by the human vision system. From that point, the chapters are grouped into the types of image transformations. Formulas are explained either graphically or with very simple mathematical notation. Before and after pictures are provided for each transformation. In chapter five, the author goes into some introductory computer vision and object recognition techniques. The handling of morphological processing is exceptional. The chapter on image compression does a good basic job of getting its ideas across to the reader. However, only the most basic compression techniques are explained in detail such as truncation and Huffman coding. JPEG and motion compression are just verbally described, due to the introductory nature of this text. More recent compression methods such as those involving wavelets are omitted. Part four of the book, "Image Operation Studies", is effective at hammering home what was discussed in the first three parts of the book. In part four, the author describes the algorithmic implementation of 39 of the image transformations described in the book, with the resulting images. This makes for an excellent summary and review for the student. The software on the book's companion disk has long ago become obsolete, but the ideas presented in the book are clear and great for any beginner in the field.

If you want to start with and understand digital image processing from its basic, this is the right book. Without too much maths it gets you to the point of what can be done, and how it can be done. It helped me to achieve a basic understanding from the zero level.