This volume consists of the presentations of disinguished researchers from both industrial and academic institutions, at a two day conference on computer vision and image processing held in London at the end of November last year. The recent advances made by major industrial and academic research organizations combined with the initiatives of the Alvey Program have led to a rapid growth and high expectation in these important areas. Currently, many systems are capable of dealing with fairly simple situations such as basic robot manipulation of image identification where the images to be interpreted are either predictable or highly constrained. However, there is a high demand for systems which can handle more complex and sophisticated situations. In defence, for example, there is an urgent need for systems which can provide automatic target recognition and detection. Correspondingly, in the manufacturing industry considerable progress has been made in techniques which deal with an increasing range of vision competences. The book concludes with a number of contributions from academics and industry which describe methods and algorithms fundamental to image enhancement and reconstruction. The methods include of the use of entropy for image reconstruction, shape analysis using the Hough transform, techniques for data capturre together with general purpose algorithms essential for successful image interpretation. The book is intended for scientists and managers in industry with reearch interests in the areas of vision and image processing.

Table of Contents:
Part 1 : Machine vision open world applications, Andrew C. Sleigh; towards the automatic interpretation of mechanical engineering drawings, S.H. Joseph et al; efficient image analysis techiques for automated visual inspection, E.R. Davies; use of the radon transform as a method of extracting symbolic representation of shape in two dimensions, V. Leavers; shape analysis using the Hough transform, J. Kittler Part 2 Optical flow: matching edgels to compute visual motion, D.A. Castelow; a least-squares algorithm for analysing optical flow, S.J. Maybank; interpreting edge-based optical flow, P. Greenway; three-dimensional interpretation of optical flow, Mitiche. Part 3: Image processing/analysis: Photon limited image processing, J.C. Dainty; maximum entropy image reconstruction, S.F. Gull; data capture techniques for 3-D facial imaging, S.J. Marshall et al; the NAGSERC image processing algorithms library, S. Hammarling and A.Bartlett; parallel algorithms in image processing, J. Muller; combinatorial optimization for image representation and object recognition, Christofides and A.G. Constantinides.