Digital Image Processing: A Practical Introduction Using Java (With CD-ROM)

With the ongoing explosion in the popularity of digital cameras, online image delivery, powerful graphics-editing programs, and digital video, the technologies involved have been receiving a lot of attention. But such technologies have been evolving for years and Digital Image Processing Using Java provides a fine snapshot (pun intended) of the state of digital-imaging art. A serious treatment of the theory and practice of encoding and manipulating graphics data, the book explains how computer programs work with pixels, colors, and other aspects of digital imaging. And the text puts an emphasis on sampling, filtering, compression, and additional manipulation algorithms.

But this book is about digital images, not Java. The Java programming language is just a tool for illustrating how to manipulate image data. (Because of its clean design, Java is particularly well suited to this job.) A typical section in the book gives the theory behind a particular kind of image processing (often with some pure math that's easy to follow with a bit of study) and then shows how Java implements the idea. Java2D API classes are used in the code listings, illustrating the results using sample images (some in color) and graphs. --David Wall

Topics covered: Techniques for representing visual information digitally, and for manipulating those representations with software. It doesn't cover individual file formats with much detail, but Digital Image Processing pays tons of attention to sampling, color enhancement, edge detection, affine transforms, and compression. Code samples in the book are in Java.