TABLE OF CONTENTS It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. However, in the Digital Era, we find that a typical color picture corresponds to more than a million words, or bytes. Our ability to sense something like 30 frames a second of color imagery, each the equivalent of tens of millions of pixels, means that we can process a wealth of image data the equivalent of perhaps 1 Gigabyte/second (1 GB/s or 1 10 9 B/s). The wonder and preeminent role of vision in our world can hardly be overstated, and today's digital dialect allows us to quantify this. In fact, our eyes and minds are not only acquiring and storing this much data, but processing it for a multitude of tasks, from 3-D rendering to color processing, from segmentation to pattern recognition, from scene analysis and memory recall to image understanding and finally data archiving, all in real time. Rudimentary computer science analogs of similar image processing functions can consume tens of thousands of operations per pixel, corresponding to perhaps 10 13 operations/s. In the end, this continuous data stream is stored in what must be the ultimate compression system, utilizing a highly prioritized, time-dependent bit allocation method. Yet despite the high density mapping (which is iossy nature chose lossy compression!), on important enough data sets we can reconstruct images (e.g., events) with nearly perfect clarity. While estimates on the brain's storage capacity are indeed astounding (e.g., 1.25 ...
