Steve on Image Processing

June 12th, 2009

References on my shelf

Matt Whitaker asked me in a blog comment recently about the references I keep on my own shelf.

Well, first of all I seem to keep fewer things on my bookshelves as the years go by. When I first started at MathWorks I had two tall bookcases in my office, filled with about 25 linear feet of books and journals. I guess I still had the academic's pack-rat habit. Now I'm down to about 5 feet of books in my office, plus about another 5 feet of journals on the team bookcase nearby.

I don't actually keep any image processing books in my office (except for my own, of course). When we're studying algorithms for possible use in our products, mostly we are looking at journal papers, and most of those are available online. The 5 feet of journal space on the team bookcase is for IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, which for some mysterious reason is still not available in electronic form. [Update: it's available now.] The image processing book that's been the most useful for toolbox development is Soille's Morphological Image Analysis: Principles and Applications. We learned a lot from that book when we were working on morphology functions in Image Processing Toolbox version 3, and I still refer to it regularly.

For the occasional digital signal processing theory question, I have two books from my grad school days: Oppenheim and Schafer's Discrete-Time Signal Processing (signed by Schafer!) and Dudgeon and Mersereau's Multidimensional Digital Signal Processing.

Most of my bookshelves these days are taken up with software development books:

  • General software development books like Code Complete by McConnell, The Pragmatic Programmer by Hunt and Thomas, and Refactoring by Fowler
  • Algorithms in C (in multiple volumes) by Sedgewick
  • Design Patterns by the "gang of four"
  • A pile of C++ books by authors such as Josuttis, Alexandrescu, Meyers, Sutter, and Vandevoorde

But perhaps the most important thing on my shelf is my personal gargoyle, who has been watching over me protectively for many years.

imag0015.jpg

What's your favorite thing (book or otherwise) on your bookshelves? Post a comment.

5 Responses to “References on my shelf”

  1. dimitris replied on :

    IEEE transactions aren’t available in electronic form if you don’t pay I think. In a world where internet community mainly founded by scientists so they can exchange scientific information so the science can grow up, some get benefit of this fact to grow up their pockets…However I hope in future my only references will be a pc with a web browser (and optional a printer!!)

  2. Steve replied on :

    Dimitris—I guess my point wasn’t clear; articles from IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence aren’t available in electronic form at all, whether or not you pay. This is different from many (most?) other IEEE journals, and I’ve often wondered about the difference. I am a paying subscriber to several IEEE journals, and I am accustomed to paying to download articles from journals I do not subscribe to. IEEE journals are produced by a staff of people that need to be paid. However, IEEE is a nonprofit organization, and no one is getting rich from IEEE journal subscriptions and article fees.

  3. Steven Gillan replied on :

    I have mainly the textbooks I used for my grad courses, Digital Signal Processing by Antoniou, Discrete-Time Control Systems (Ogata), Practical Optimization: Algorithms and Emgineering Applications (Antoniou and Lu), and Fundamental of Matrix Computations (Watkins)

    Also, Linux in a Nutshell is always handy. Aside from that, my area is pretty minimalist. As a grad student, my university has access to IEEE and other databases, so I generally review articles electronically.

  4. Ramnath replied on :

    IEEE PAMI is available in electronic form here!
    http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=34

    I am not very sure why you say it is not. Maybe older issues have not been digitized but all current issues are put online

  5. Steve replied on :

    Ramnath—Thanks for the update. I’m glad to see they have finally done this. The last time I renewed my IEEE membership, the journal was still not available for online subscription.

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Steve Eddins manages the Image & Geospatial development team at The MathWorks and coauthored Digital Image Processing Using MATLAB. He writes here about image processing concepts, algorithm implementations, and MATLAB.

  • Sana: hi steve, could you explain to me how i would be able to use the dir function, to do a loop through a directory...
  • Nishtha: Sir, I have preprocessed the image in following steps: [1] adaptive histogram equalization [2] thresholding...
  • Kristof: I also strongly support the idea. I have just recently bumped into the problem that im2single was not...
  • Steve: David—I’ m glad you found it useful!
  • David Lalejini: I found your example very useful for finding connected nodes in a large set of input pairs. I start...
  • tommy: Dear Steve, I have a question,please if you are kind to help me regarding the accumulator array dimensions of...
  • Steve: Abc—I don’t know how to distinguish the faces. You might try posting your question in the MATLAB...
  • Manju: well if we have a few ovals within each other like in a cell how do we measure the distance from the center...
  • Steve: Manju—What do you mean? How is each region defined?
  • Manju: if we have 2-3 regions within each other how do we measure the regions of each one?

These postings are the author's and don't necessarily represent the opinions of The MathWorks.