ABSTRACT
A little more than 10 years ago, digital image processing (IP) was the art of a restricted circle of initiates. Special effects software houses used expensive state-of-the-art computer workstations to meet the IP needs of their customers, while the personal computer was still growing out of its infancy and capable of little more than few basic image processing functions. Computers generally were limited not only by the difficulty of meeting the computational demands of IP, but also by the limited memory capacity of the mass storage devices available.
