The advancement of security technologies has allowed information systems to store more crucial and sensitive data. With these advancements, organisations turn to physiological and behavioral methods of identification in order to guard against unwanted intrusion. Research Developments in Biometrics and Video Processing Techniques investigates advanced techniques in user identification and security, including retinal, facial, and finger print scans as well as signature and voice authentication models. Through its in-depth examination of computer vision applications and other biometric security technologies, this reference volume will provide researchers, engineers, developers, and students with insight into the latest research on enhanced security systems design and development.

Similar to the way in which computer vision and computer graphics act as the dual fields that connect image processing in modern computer science, the field of image processing can be considered a crucial middle road between the vision and graphics fields. Research Developments in Computer Vision and Image Processing: Methodologies and Applications brings together various research methodologies and trends in emerging areas of application of computer vision and image processing. This book is useful for students, researchers, scientists, and engineers interested in the research developments of this rapidly growing field.

Due to its inherent time-scale locality characteristics, the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) has received considerable attention in signal/image processing. Wavelet transforms have excellent energy compaction characteristics and can provide perfect reconstruction. The shifting (translation) and scaling (dilation) are unique to wavelets. Orthogonality of wavelets with respect to dilations leads to multigrid representation. As the computation of DWT involves filtering, an efficient filtering process is essential in DWT hardware implementation. In the multistage DWT, coefficients are calculated recursively, and in addition to the wavelet decomposition stage, extra space is required to store the intermediate coefficients. Hence, the overall performance depends significantly on the precision of the intermediate DWT coefficients. This work presents new implementation techniques of DWT, that are efficient in terms of computation, storage, and with better signal-to-noise ratio in the reconstructed signal.

Good quality digital images have high storage and bandwidth requirements. In modern times, with increasing user expectation for image quality, efficient compression is necessary to keep memory and transmission time within reasonable limits.

Image compression is concerned with minimization of the number of information carrying units used to represent an image. Lossy compression techniques incur some loss of information which is usually imperceptible. In return for accepting this distortion, we obtain much higher compression ratios than is possible with lossless compression.

Salient features of this book include: four new image compression algorithms and implementation of these algorithms; detailed discussion of fuzzy geometry measures and their application in image compression algorithms; new domain decomposition based algorithms using image quality measures and study of various quality measures for gray scale image compression; compression algorithms for different parallel architectures and evaluation of time complexity for encoding on all architectures; parallel implementation of image compression algorithms on a cluster in Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) environment.

This book will be of interest to graduate students, researchers and practicing engineers looking for new image compression techniques that provide good perceived quality in digital images with higher compression ratios than is possible with conventional algorithms.