Computer Vision

Rating:
Summary: very useful for surface reconstruction
Review: I have used this book for preparing some of my lectures on computer vision. In particular in areas such as stereo and shape-from-shading, it belonged to the textbooks that were most useful for me: The explanations are supplemented with many illustrations, the descriptions are easy to understand for students, and eventually the methods are represented by concise algorithms enabling straightforward implementations. While this book is not intended to cover all areas in computer vision, it may serve as a very useful introduction to those fields where its authors are experts: stereo reconstruction and shape-from-shading. In my opinion, computer vision has not yet matured to a scientific field where it is possible to write five stars textbooks, but this book certainly deserves four stars.

Rating:
Summary: very useful for surface reconstruction
Review: I have used this book for preparing some of my lectures on computer vision. In particular in areas such as stereo and shape-from-shading, it belonged to the textbooks that were most useful for me: The explanations are supplemented with many illustrations, the descriptions are easy to understand for students, and eventually the methods are represented by concise algorithms enabling straightforward implementations. While this book is not intended to cover all areas in computer vision, it may serve as a very useful introduction to those fields where its authors are experts: stereo reconstruction and shape-from-shading. In my opinion, computer vision has not yet matured to a scientific field where it is possible to write five stars textbooks, but this book certainly deserves four stars.

Rating:
Summary: A great practical book
Review: This book gives in a simple and explicit way all of the fine details one needs in order to implement 3D reconstruction methods.

I have been teaching computer vision for a while, and whenever a new student needs to learn about the bits and bytes of a specific algorithm I refer her/him to this book.

It is a great book for beginners and those that set up their own systems.

Rating:
Summary: From a Graduate Student
Review: This book is full of mistypings, spelling errors and grammar errors. It annoys you with all of its sentences. If only the authors didn't use the word "respectively"... The book repeats itself, goes in deep details with the simplest tasks any computer science student should know, and passes the more advanced ones without proper explanations. It leaves you with the impression that the authors do not fully understand what they are speaking about. In some parts, it is as unscientific as a scientific textbook can be. For example, in explaining white balance procedure of a ccd camera the book tells you to turn the camera towards a white object and press the white balance button.

Despite these failures the authors are fairly successful in giving a comprehensive picture of what 3D shape recovery requires and how it can be implemented, hence the second star.