Reviews (13)

Clear text, many examples, excellent
I used it in my Statistics introduction class and found it especially clear written and understandable. Many examples explain the concepts.

A disaster!
A horrible book. The text is convoluted and never clear, the exercise problems are completely outside the subject matter of the chapters, the chapters themselves are hardly explanatory (you get two-four paragraphs of "whats" and maybe three examples total, and folks these chapters are meant to cover a lot of ground), and there is hardly any explanation as to WHY this stuff works.A pointless book that can only be used in conjunction to a very well taught class.This book will NEVER teach you anything by itself. I cannot see anyone who learns through this book being able to perform this math after a couple of years, it is a clear book for monkey-see-monkey-does-monkey-has-no-clue-what-went-on-but-got-the-right-answer math.

Great for "applied" types like me
I would guess all the intensely negative reviews are from "pure-math" types. But, if you need to understand how to apply probability to some real-world problem, this book is for you.

I have never encountered such an easy-to-read description of probability. Also, there are absolutely great, intuitive examples which are non-trivial and easily extended. I completely disagree that this book encourages memorization -- rather, there are many examples which give both an intuitive/thinking-about-it solution and a formulaic solution.

Also, there are easy-to-find "rules" for probablisitic-type functions and operations which are very clearly explained and accompanied with non-trivial examples.

The notation may be a little clunky, but it is very easy to find the definitions and the index is reasonably complete. Also, there are several valuable appendicies. Oh, and there are solutions to odd-numbered excercises and solutions to mock-exams. What's not to like?

Reviews (8)

Not a helpful book
a terrible book for self-study. may be good as a class companion where the teacher explains a lot. but the author does not approach linear algebra in an pedagogical way that enables self-study. solutions for exercises come out of the blue of the sky. also errors found.

Excellent Book
I loved using this book for my Linear Algebra class. It explains everything well and provides ample examples.

Reviews (21)

A great book for self-study
I used the book for self-study in combination with Strang's freely available video lectures. The book's emphasis is on understanding and appreciating concepts, rather than on formal proofs. As I have experienced him, Strang is very good at explaining things. He uses lots of examples, and, the textbook as well as the video lectures are very easy to comprehend. His informal writing helps to make the book an interesting read. For me, having had some linear algebra in high school, most ideas were familiar. However, it was always delightful for me to look at Strang's perspective on things. One clearly sees that Strang has a lot of experience in teaching linear algebra. He introduces new ideas in a very natural way, emphasizing what they are good for beforehand. I particularly liked the chapter on determinants.

The book doesn't require any prior knowledge besides very basic high school math. I used it in my year of civilian national service, before starting to go to college. Compared to other college level books for math majors I have looked at, this book works great for self-study. The level of difficulty seems to be something inbetween high school and university level (math major).

Borrowed 4 times from library; time to buy.
This engineer is interested in the insight that maths can provide, not the proofs that can be written. This book aims for insight.

If you want to put the students to sleep, if you don't want your class to see past the proof then this is not the book for you.

Reviews (15)

need some enhancements
The book is not well organized even though the organization is very important for such a book with a lot of contents.

Nice book
Pleasure to read.Also, make sure u get ISBN: 0139353224.
Two-Dimensional Signal and Image Processing

Reviews (8)

Outstanding Book !
This book is just GREAT.
It covers almost every single ascpect of image and video processing. Everything is in deep and very good explained. A lot of before-and-after example pictures (important ones in color) are provided too. But beware. You need a fairly good understanding of math to read the book. It is not intended to explain how to use Photoshop, but rather how to write your own ;-)
This book is not a read-along book. Sometimes you have to read a section 2 or 3 times to understand it.
I think sometimes a good Snippet of C-Code would help to understand, but this is acceptable.
Again: A outstanding book, which fully covers all my needs.
The price of 100 us$ is ok, because it's a lot of a book...

premier organization
mnodihreifjdpovifhjeoivhd890yweihnodj-p0w dnjdoiud0oihnedopdu9eujekf[dkd]v ddoivuhd9 buyd90fueofue9 b9ufdf8uepfd dfhdoiuydo9ifhjdopud09 u9pfuue09fue09fu fdfh dufyeiofhe 90ue09fuhe9f79efu9u9efh e8yheo8fue09 9ue09fuepf0iue-0f 9eufe90fueofue9f78dh

Image Processing for the mathematically inclined
This is an encyclopedia of image processing topics.It contains some introductory material to help people understand what images are and how to process them.The majority of the text, however, is for experiencedpeople wanting to look up topics.

This book is big.It is about 8"x11" by 900 pages.It contains material from 100 different professionals on 50 different topics.

The style is academic.The editor is the editor of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.The page style is similar to what you would see in an IEEE Transaction.

There is plenty of math.The text explains the mathematics, but not to the depth I would like to see.

The authors illustrate the techniques with many images.If there are no "before and after" images in an image processing book, reject it.Well, this book has plenty of images.That is a strong point.

A week point is there is no source codeillustrating the techniques and algorithms.I find this a major weakness, but one that is not unique to this book.

The authors leave much to the reader.This is not a read from cover to cover book.The reader must go slow, take notes, study, and read again to understand the material.

Reviews (6)

Good Overall Book - Lot of typos and bugs.
I am currently enrolled in a computer vision class and we used the book to write a lot of the code for image processing.So far we have found a lot of typos and bugs in the code which wasted a lot of time in getting this to work.Some like an incorrectly calculated quadratic formula where easy to see in Major Axis but others like errors in the Moments code took a lot of debugging to find.Would love a second revised edition with the code thoroughly checked for errors.Oh and it turns out that the Major Axis code does not even work correctly, allowing the major and minor axis to switch after 90 degrees of rotation, this is something you probably wouldn't notice using it to process a static image but you can see when working with live video.I understand that this book is meant for people already in the field but that is not an excuse for writing bad code.

Author's Comment
Potential buyers, please keep in mind that this book is for people that already know image processing theory or are enrolled in a course. We wrote this book for the student engineer to rapidly be able to code algorithms. They are very simply written, more so for understanding and ease of typing (most are one small page) than for algorithmic elegance or efficiency. Note that the book is very small and has a soft leatherette cover--this is so it fits comfortably in your back pocket and can be pulled out as needed. There is no CD, type the code in yourself and learn as you go. Some things are done for a reason, enjoy!

Reviews (3)

Well balanced!
The authors of this well balanced textbook succeed admirably well in teaching the subject to the union of students in math and in cs, and to engineers. The danger with subjects that cut accross fields is that they might appeal to the intersection of audiences involved rather than to the much larger union. The authors seem to be at home with all the types of readers, they realize that the lingo and the aim is different for the different and diverse groups of students. Indeed, the tools of information theory, data compression, and arithmetic coding are widely used in science. While the mathematical parts of the subject is old[Shannon, Kolmogorov..., measurements of information, entropy, channel capacity], the applications are still going strong, with new things coming out at a fast rate right up to the present. So the emphasis in the book on data and image compression is very appropriate. There is even a JPEGtool user's guide in the appendix.

Best Book on Compression
I read a lot of books on Compression, but this is indeed the best one I ever bought. I love this book and read it frequently.

Reviews (13)

Cover and Thomas ain't no Robert Gallager
This book is a predictable dissapointment.It is just yet another of the best examples of how modern textbooks have diverged from traditional textbooks of the 1950 - 1970's.Although this book doesn't focus too heavily on the "practical" aspects as far as implementation of information theory, it is clear that todays books are not nearly as mathematically rigorous as the books of yesteryear....

Not an introductory text
My big complaint with this book is that it is written like the math texts of the 1950's. This book has the words "Lemma" and "Corollary" about 5 times per page.

This book is a pure mathematical approach. I prefer a more pedagogical style, where the equations are explained in plain terms, with examples. This text gives the equations and presumes that is adequate.

I would say that this book should only be used by advanced upper graduate level courses, and only after a strong introduction to information theory. As well your probability, stochastic (markov chains), and infinite series skills need to be very strong.

I must stress that this book is written very mathematical. What I mean by this is that all equations are written in the (very hard to understand) shorthand notation. I am sure math majors enjoy that style, but for engineers it can be bothersome having to look up what this and that symbol mean.

While this book is worthy enough to stay in my collection, it is by far the last book I reach for when I look stuff up.

Reviews (6)

The definitive JPEG book for programmers
This book is a "must have" for anyone interested in understanding the JPEG standard.It has two distinct parts.
The second half is the JPEG standard itself.It contains all the technical details of how JPEG works, including pseudocode flow charts, and test data to verify JPEG compliance.
The first half is the author's (less formal) understanding of the JPEG standard, where he explains the details of the standard which might be unclear to the novice.
Everything from the aspects of the human visual system, to the mathematics of Discrete Cosine Transformation, to entropy coding, to JPEG file organization is explained.
I knew nothing about image processing before studying this book.After studying this book (for a long time) I was able to write a complete application and have total control over reading and writing JPG files.

excellent!
I laughed, I cried, it was better than GIF

Editorial Review

Khalid Sayood's textbook-style Introduction to Data Compression is the definitive guide to all kinds of compression schemes. Early chapters establish the mathematics involved in basic compression techniques, including lossless and lossy compression as well as the fundamentals of information theory that lay the groundwork for common forms of compression. (The book contains all the relevant formulas, although those who don't need such mathematical detail will still be able to understand the book.)

A good portion of the book examines various compression schemes, their strengths and weaknesses, and what content they work best for. Introduction to Data Compression begins with lossless compression schemes, which lose no information during the compression/decompression process. Huffman Coding, a well-established compression scheme, and arithmetic and dictionary coding also receive excellent treatment. In addition, the author takes on lossless compression for images.