One hardly needs to emphasize the importance of visual sensing and interpretation in our everyday lives and the severe limitations and handicaps imposed on the blind. The importance of human vision has motivated an intense interest in and significant research on artificial vision systems over the last 20 years. The relatively new, fast growing discipline of “machine (or computer) vision” is an outgrowth of this research.Machine vision is computation on images to produce useful, meaningful descriptions of a visual environment. A machine vision system may be used either as a symbiotic enhancement to human vision or as the perceptual component of an autonomous, goal-driven computational system capable of cognitive processing.
