Image recognition

The ultimate goal of most image processing is to extract information about some high-level and application-dependent objects from an image available in low-level (pixel) form. The objects may be of every day interest like in robotics, cosmic ray showers or particle tracks like in physics, chromosomes like in biology, houses, roads, or differently used agricultural surfaces like in aerial photography or synthetic-aperture radar, etc.

This task of pattern recognition is usually preceded by multiple steps of image restoration and enhancement, image segmentation, or feature extraction, steps which can be described in general terms. The final description in problem-dependent terms, and even more so the eventual image reconstruction, escapes such generality, and the literature of application areas has to be consulted. Jain89 deals with many problems in the most general possible way.