The book contains a selection of high quality papers, chosen among the best presentations during the International Conference on Spectral and High-Order Methods (2014), and provides an overview of the depth and breadth of the activities within this important research area. The carefully reviewed selection of papers will provide the reader with a snapshot of the state-of-the-art and help initiate new research directions through the extensive biography.

In image processing and computer vision applications such as medical or scientific image data analysis, as well as in industrial scenarios, images are used as input measurement data. It is good scientific practice that proper measurements must be equipped with error and uncertainty estimates. For many applications, not only the measured values but also their errors and uncertainties, should be-and more and more frequently are-taken into account for further processing. This error and uncertainty propagation must be done for every processing step such that the final result comes with a reliable precision estimate. The goal of this book is to introduce the reader to the recent advances from the field of uncertainty quantification and error propagation for computer vision, image processing, and image analysis that are based on partial differential equations (PDEs). It presents a concept with which error propagation and sensitivity analysis can be formulated with a set of basic operations. The approach discussed in this book has the potential for application in all areas of quantitative computer vision, image processing, and image analysis. In particular, it might help medical imaging finally become a scientific discipline that is characterized by the classical paradigms of observation, measurement, and error awareness. This book is comprised of eight chapters. After an introduction to the goals of the book (Chapter 1), we present a brief review of PDEs and their numerical treatment (Chapter 2), PDE-based image processing (Chapter 3), and the numerics of stochastic PDEs (Chapter 4). We then proceed to define the concept of stochastic images (Chapter 5), describe how to accomplish image processing and computer vision with stochastic images (Chapter 6), and demonstrate the use of these principles for accomplishing sensitivity analysis (Chapter 7). Chapter 8 concludes the book and highlights new research topics for the future.

The book contains a selection of high quality papers, chosen among the best presentations during the International Conference on Spectral and High-Order Methods (2014), and provides an overview of the depth and breadth of the activities within this important research area. The carefully reviewed selection of papers will provide the reader with a snapshot of the state-of-the-art and help initiate new research directions through the extensive biography.

As we increase our reliance on computer-generated information, often using it as part of our decision-making process, we must devise tools to assess the correctness of that information. Consider, for example, software embedded on vehicles, used for simulating aircraft performance, or used in medical imaging. In those cases, software correctness is of paramount importance as there's little room for error. Software verification is one of the tools available to attain such goals. Verification is a well known and widely studied subfield of computer science and computational science and the goal is to help us increase confidence in the software implementation by verifying that the software does what it is supposed to do. The goal of this book is to introduce the reader to software verification in the context of visualization. In the same way we became more dependent on commercial software, we have also increased our reliance on visualization software. The reason is simple: visualization is the lens through which users can understand complex data, and as such it must be verified. The explosion in our ability to amass data requires tools not only to store and analyze data, but also to visualize it. This book is comprised of six chapters. After an introduction to the goals of the book, we present a brief description of both worlds of visualization (Chapter 2) and verification (Chapter 3). We then proceed to illustrate the main steps of the verification pipeline for visualization algorithms. We focus on two classic volume visualization techniques, namely, Isosurface Extraction (Chapter 4) and Direct Volume Rendering (Chapter 5). We explain how to verify implementations of those techniques and report the latest results in the field of verification of visualization techniques. The last chapter concludes the book and highlights new research topics for the future.

This book provides a seamless approach to numerical algorithms, modern programming techniques and parallel computing. These concepts and tools are usually taught serially across different courses and different textbooks, thus observing the connection between them. The necessity of integrating these subjects usually comes after such courses are concluded (e.g., during a first job or a thesis project), thus forcing the student to synthesize what is perceived to be three independent subfields into one in order to produce a solution. The book includes both basic and advanced topics and places equal emphasis on the discretization of partial differential equations and on solvers. Advanced topics include wavelets, high-order methods, non-symmetric systems and parallelization of sparse systems. A CD-ROM accompanies the text.