ABSTRACT
In the early 1960s, the joint advent of the semiconductor computer and the space program formally brought
the field of digital image processing into public focus. Swiftly, digital image processing found many
applications other than the space program and became an active research area and a graduate course offered in
many universities in the 1970s and early 1980s. With the tremendous advancements continuously made in the
very large scale integration (VLSI) computer and information processing, images, image sequences, and video
have become indispensable elements of our modern daily life. The trend is powerfully continuing nowadays.
Examples include the high availability of laptop personal computers (PCs), digital cameras, scanners, mobile
phones, and Internet in our daily life. Examples also include popularly utilized international image and video
compression standards such as Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG), JPEG2000, Moving Picture Experts
Group (MPEG)-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and International Telecommunication Union (ITU) video
coding standards H.263 and H.26L. Therefore, it is not surprising to know that imaging technologies are
considered one of the 20 Greatest Engineering Achievements made by mankind in the 20th century
