Three-Dimensional

The growing field of three-dimensional (3-D) computer vision-programs that can interpret the world from sensor data-is the topic of Three-Dimensional Computer Vision by Yoshiaki Shirai (Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1987, 297 pp., $95.00) The term "three-dimensional" is used to distinguish the field from two-dimensional pattern (2-D) recognition, such as character recognition or the recognition of silhouettes. The 3-D scene-understanding problem is made difficult by shadows, uneven lighting, texture, and objects that occlude other objects The sensors used include those that obtain a greylevel or color-intensity image of a scene, methods that project a sheet of light on an object to reveal its 3-D structure, and distance-measuring devices that provide a "range image" in which the value of each picture element represents a distance from the sensor to a point in the scene Such range sensors are important because they are not affected by lighting conditions and shadows. This book, not to be confused with Takeo Kanade's Three-Dimensional Machine Vision (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1987), describes the fundamental technology of 3-D computer vision for various applications The first four chapters are devoted to basic methods of computer vision. This is followed by chapters on image feature extraction (edge analysis, edge linking and following, and region methods) and image feature description (representing lines, segmenting a sequence of points, fitting line equations, and converting between lines and regions). Once these preliminaries are completed, the author concentrates on the 3-D world.