Siogkas G. - Visual Media Processing Using MATLAB: Beginners Guide

George Siogkas is currently the Associate Dean of the Department of Engineering and Informatics at New York College, Greece, where he has been teaching as a senior lecturer for the past four years. He also has more than ten years of research experience in the academia. His keen passion for MATLAB programming, especially in the areas of image and video processing, was developed while working towards a PhD in the field of computer vision for intelligent transportation systems.

Dr. Siogkas received his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Patras, Greece in 2013.

For more information about the author, visit his webpage, at http://www.cvrlab.com/gsiogkas.

I would like to first and foremost thank my beautiful wife, Maro, who put up with my exhausting writing schedule for both this book and my PhD thesis, while staying focused enough to organize our wedding. I would also like to thank my parents and my brother for their continuous support, especially during this past year. Without the encouragement from all of them, this project would never even have got started in the first place.

I would also like to thank everyone at Packt Publishing who got involved in this book, especially Joanne Fitzpatrick, Hardik Patel, Navu Dhillon, and Anila Vincent. They played a very important role in helping me understand the rationale behind such a writing project and provided invaluable feedback throughout the writing process. Also, a special thanks goes to the reviewers, R. Surya Murali, Ashish Uthama, and Alexander Wright, who provided very useful and insightful comments and suggestions for improving the quality of the book. Without them all, this book would never have reached its publishing stage.

R. Surya Murali received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from Osmania University. He has seven years of research experience on Membrane technology for gas and liquid separations. He has worked as a senior research fellow and junior research fellow at the Indian Institute of Chemical Technology. He also has experience in the installation, operation, and maintenance of membrane separation systems at laboratory and pilot plant levels. He has developed expertise in the synthesis, modification, and characterization of various types of membranes for different membrane processes. He has also gained knowledge in developing simulation programs in Microsoft Excel, C, and MATLAB.

I am thankful to my family and friends for their constant support and encouragement.

Ashish Uthama is a developer in the Image Processing Toolbox team at Mathworks, makers of MATLAB. He has a Bachelors degree in Electronics and Communication from PESIT, Bangalore, India, and a Masters degree in Applied Science from UBC, Vancouver, Canada.

Alexander Wright is a computer vision programmer specializing in histopathological image analysis for the automated diagnosis of cancer patients. He has been using MATLAB and C++ in this domain since 2006 in collaboration with the School of Computing and the Section of Pathology, Anatomy and Tumour Biology, at the University of Leeds. Alex has co-authored many research articles that base their research on his image analysis algorithms, and is interested in the standardization of automated histology image analysis for routine clinical application. In his spare time, Alex enjoys performing image manipulation in MATLAB and Adobe Photoshop for web design projects, and playing his bass guitar at unnecessarily loud volumes.

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Preface

Digital visual media has, undoubtedly, become a vital part of our everyday lives. Analog means of storing and processing information have gradually faded and are nowadays used either by aficionados of analog media, or for very specialized applications. Capturing and storing image or video information have rapidly become common, fast, and cheap processes, since almost everyone can have access to a digital electronic device that can be used for these aims, whether it is a photographic or video camera, or even a mobile phone. The outburst of visual media-capturing devices has led to an increase of amateur photographers and weekend filmmakers, who often have a problem deciding what software to use to process their stored images or videos. The rule of thumb is that free software solutions often have limited functionalities or are very complicated, while commercial solutions tend to be very expensive and sometimes do not provide all the functionalities that a user would hope for.