ABSTRACT
To analyze the world around us, we first need to capture a representation of it. Although information in the real world spans many different modalities, current technologies can only capture a subset of that wealth of information. A photograph of a natural scene will only show a small portion of that scene, compressed to two dimensions and capturing only a subset of the spectral information available. Image statistics, consequently, capture not only regularities in nature but also inherently those of the image acquisition process. To that end, before proceeding to analyze images using the statistical tools that we will present in the remainder of this book, we will explore different capture possibilities and understand their respective limitations.
