Picture Engineering

This book seeks to elucidate picture engineering as a new discipline for hand ling the entire scope of picture processing in a systematic manner. Picture engineering as a discipline has three aspects, the first of which is methodo logical, technical, and architectural. The second consists of pattern ana lysis and recognition of pictorial input, picture database management, inclu ding picture data structure and data representation for picture storage and transformation, and computer graphics for picture output and display. Ver satile applications such as computer-aided design, manufacturing and testing (CAD/CAM/CAT), office automation (GA), robotics, and fancy computer arts com prise the third aspect. This book covers all three aspects in original papers by leading experts in the discipline. The book is divided into six parts. Part I covers the central topic of pictorial database management in three papers. The first, by Yamaguchi and Kunii, presents a data model for designing a picture database computer. The second, by Klinger, discusses the organization of computers for handling pic torial data. In the third paper, Shi-Kuo Chang treats the indexing and enco ding of pictorial data. Part II is devoted to picture representation. First, a general approach to picture analysis using both syntactic (structural) and semantic information is described by Fu. This is followed by an in-depth explanation of various 3-D shape representation methods by Ikebe and Miyamoto. Schumaker elaborates polar spline representation of 3-D objects, and finally,Enomoto, Yonezaki and Watanabe describe a unique method of characterizing 3-D surfaces by struc ture lines.