The human face is perhaps the most familiar and easily recognized object in the world, yet both its three-dimensional shape and its two-dimensional images are complex and hard to characterize. This book develops the vocabulary of ridges and parabolic curves, of illumination eigenfaces and elastic warpings for describing the perceptually salient features of a face and its images. The book also explores the underlying mathematics and applies these mathematical techniques to the computer vision problem of face recognition, using both optical and range images.

The human face is perhaps the most familiar and easily recognized object in the world, yet both its three-dimensional shape and its two-dimensional images are complex and hard to characterize. This book develops the vocabulary of ridges and parabolic curves, of illumination eigenfaces and elastic warpings for describing the perceptually salient features of a face and its images. The book also explores the underlying mathematics and applies these mathematical techniques to the computer vision problem of face recognition, using both optical and range images.

Homology theory is a powerful algebraic tool that is at the centre of current research in topology and its applications. This accessible textbook will appeal to mathematics students interested in the application of algebra to geometrical problems, specifically the study of surfaces (sphere, torus, Mobius band, Klein bottle). In this introduction to simplicial homology - the most easily digested version of homology theory - the author studies interesting geometrical problems, such as the structure of two-dimensional surfaces and the embedding of graphs in surfaces, using the minimum of algebraic machinery and including a version of Lefschetz duality. Assuming very little mathematical knowledge, the book provides a complete account of the algebra needed (abelian groups and presentations), and the development of the material is always carefully explained with proofs given in full detail. Numerous examples and exercises are also included, making this an ideal text for undergraduate courses or for self-study.

Homology theory is a powerful algebraic tool that is at the centre of current research in topology and its applications. This accessible textbook will appeal to mathematics students interested in the application of algebra to geometrical problems, specifically the study of surfaces (sphere, torus, Mobius band, Klein bottle). In this introduction to simplicial homology - the most easily digested version of homology theory - the author studies interesting geometrical problems, such as the structure of two-dimensional surfaces and the embedding of graphs in surfaces, using the minimum of algebraic machinery and including a version of Lefschetz duality. Assuming very little mathematical knowledge, the book provides a complete account of the algebra needed (abelian groups and presentations), and the development of the material is always carefully explained with proofs given in full detail. Numerous examples and exercises are also included, making this an ideal text for undergraduate courses or for self-study.

The world is full of objects, many of which are visible to us as surfaces. Examples are people, cars, machines, computers and bananas. Exceptions are such things as clouds and trees, which have a more detailed, fuzzy structure. Computer vision aims to detect and reconstruct features of surfaces from the images produced by cameras, in some ways mimicking the way in which humans reconstruct features of the world around them by using their eyes. This book describes how the 3D shape of surfaces can be recovered from image sequences of outlines. Cipolla and Giblin provide all the necessary background in differential geometry (assuming knowledge of elementary algebra and calculus) and in the analysis of visual motion, and emphasizes intuitive visual understanding of the geometric techniques with computer-generated illustrations. They also give a thorough introduction to the mathematical techniques and the details of the implementations, and apply the methods to data from real images.

The world is full of objects, many of which are visible to us as surfaces. Examples are people, cars, machines, computers and bananas. Exceptions are such things as clouds and trees, which have a more detailed, fuzzy structure. Computer vision aims to detect and reconstruct features of surfaces from the images produced by cameras, in some ways mimicking the way in which humans reconstruct features of the world around them by using their eyes. This book describes how the 3D shape of surfaces can be recovered from image sequences of outlines. Cipolla and Giblin provide all the necessary background in differential geometry (assuming knowledge of elementary algebra and calculus) and in the analysis of visual motion, and emphasizes intuitive visual understanding of the geometric techniques with computer-generated illustrations. They also give a thorough introduction to the mathematical techniques and the details of the implementations, and apply the methods to data from real images.

This monograph considers a basic problem in the computer analysis of natural images, which are images of scenes involving multiple objects that are obtained by a camera lens or a viewer's eye. The goal is to detect geometric features of objects in the image and to separate regions of the objects with distinct visual properties. When the scene is illuminated by a single principal light source, we further include the visual clues resulting from the interaction of the geometric features of objects, the shade/shadow regions on the objects, and the "apparent contours". We do so by a mathematical analysis using a repertoire of methods in singularity theory. This is applied for generic light directions of both the "stable configurations" for these interactions, whose features remain unchanged under small viewer movement, and the generic changes which occur under changes of view directions. These may then be used to differentiate between objects and determine their shapes and positions.