Texture is all around us, and texture is also on the images we create. Just as variation in what we do allows us to distinguish one day in our life from another, texture allows us to identify what we see. And if texture allows us to distinguish the objects around us, it cannot be ignored by any automatic system for vision. Thus, texture becomes a major part of Image Processing, around which we can build the main core of Image Processing research achievements.
This book is exactly trying to do this: it uses texture as the motivation to present some of the most important topics of Image Processing that have preoccupied the Image Processing research community in the recent years. The book covers the topics which have already been well established in Image Processing research and it has an important ambition: it tries to cover them in depth and be self-contained so that the reader does not need to open other books to understand them.
