TABLE OF CONTENTS From the beginning of science, visual observation has played a major role. At that time, the only way to document the results of an experiment was by verbal description and manual drawings. The next major step was the invention of photography which enabled results to be documented objectively. Three prominent examples of scientific applications of photography are astronomy, photogrammetry, and particle physics. Astronomers were able to measure positions and magnitudes of stars and photogrammeters produced topographic maps from aerial images. Searching through countless images from hydrogen bubble chambers led to the discovery of many elementary particles in physics. These manual evaluation procedures, however, were time consuming. Some semi- or even fully automated optomechanical devices were designed. However, they were adapted to a single specific purpose. This is why quantitative evaluation of images did not find widespread application at that time. Generally, images were only used for documentation, qualitative description, and illustration of the phenomena observed.
Nowadays, we are in the middle of a second revolution sparked by the rapid progress in video and computer technology. Personal computers and workstations have become powerful enough to process image data. As a result, multimedia software and hardware is becoming standard for the handling of images, image sequences, and even 3-D visualization. The technology is now available to any scientist or engineer. In consequence, image processing has expanded and is further rapidly expanding from a few specialized applications into a standard scientific...
