Everywhere you look the significance of color information in digital processing is becoming more important than ever. The manner that color is addressed in many systems is via monochromatic based techniques; that is breaking things down into channels and manipulating them using each of the color components.

What has not been addressed in many textbooks is making the transition from scalar to vector-valued image functions. This is where Digital Color Image Processing comes in. It was written to present a detailed introduction to this topic

Digital Color Image Processing is a textbook organized in regard to advanced techniques for three dimensional scene analysis. It is contained in 376 pages, 13 chapters, and is fully indexed. It breaks down into four fundamental sections: fundamentals, processing, scene analysis, and case studies.

Chapters 1-4 begin with an introduction to the book and to the terminology used in color image processing. With regard to grey-level images the terms are common, but when trying to transfer this to vector-valued images, a common language does not yet exist.

From there, an introduction to human color vision is presented and the color blindness of a selection of the population is also addressed. Then the topic of color spaces used in color imaging is presented. Finally, the technical requirements for color image processing are considered. This includes camera, filter, illuminates, and charts, as well as techniques of photometric and colorimetric calibration needed for treatment of color images.

Chapters 5-8 focuses in on noise suppression and contrast enhancement in color images. Then the process of extraction of edges in an image is discussed. There are various procedures that are addressed and a comparison of the results of one monochromatic based and two vector-valued color edge operators are also given.

Then the techniques of using color information for image segmentation are analyzed. Here, four classes of segmentation are introduced and discussed. Finally, an overview of the techniques for highlight analysis and a new method for minimizing inter-reflections in real color images is presented, as well as alternate procedures for achieving color consistency is examined.