Review published on the Image Processing and Computer Vision, February 1999.

Reviewed by C. Delrieux, Bahia Blanca, Argentina

Good theoretical books are scarce in computer graphics. Practitioners usually adopt a pragmatic attitude toward problems, and by its nature, the field is plagued by ad hoc techniques and procedures. There is also a current debate over computer graphics education, especially about introductory courses. This book surveys a wide spectrum of the field, taking a theoretical and uniformizing viewpoint. The authors have carefully developed this viewpoint, and they fit most introductory and advanced topics in computer graphics into their framework. This way of understanding the field may be an adequate solution for the three problems mentioned above. For this reason, computer graphics practioners, developers, educators, and advanced students should pay special attention to this book.

The authors use a conceptual framework based on the notion of graphical objects and their transformations. This makes possible a uniform treatment of the basic problems and accommodates many computer graphics and image processing techniques and procedures.

This framework is presented in Part 1, which is an overview of the whole book. The authors show how most of the design concepts and primitives (including images, animations, splines, and procedural objects) can be parameterized as particular cases of their abstract definition. Then they define a transformation of a graphical object and reexamine the usual transformations in computer graphics and image processing as specific cases of their definition. This includes quite general processes, such as modeling transformations, projective transformations, and image filtering.

Part 1 concludes with an overview of morphing and warping transformations within the established conceptual framework. In particular, the authors present a broad overview of the subject, including metamorphic transformations in general, domain and range morphing, and image mapping. They give an exhaustive exposition of related work, with examples, and discuss some applications.

Part 2 contains a detailed treatment of graphical objects. The first section is about shape description, including implicit, parametric, algorithmic, and piecewise shape description. In the following section, some object representation techniques are presented, and the authors discuss some related issues (for example, level of detail and blending). The concluding section is about object reconstruction, that is, the process of recovering the original features of an object from its representation. This includes function and shape reconstruction from geometric representation, and antialiasing and resampling from image representation.

In Part 3, the authors develop the specification and computation of object transformations. Topics include parametric, algorithmic, and part specification; user interfaces; and warping and morphing techniques. The book concludes with Part 4, which presents warping and morphing in a general setting, including warping and morphing of images, plane curves, surfaces, volumetric objects, and sound.

In general, implementation details are not considered. However, the book includes a CD containing the morphos system, developed by authors, with full C++ source code. Software practitioners may extract interesting implementation details. Also, the final section of the book discusses some features and possibilities of this system.

Every section of the book has a comments and references subsection, which facilitates citation checking. However, important themes in computer graphics, such as ray tracing and radiosity, are not covered, although it would be simple to present them in the conceptual framework of the book.

The contents require some maturity in algebra and discrete mathematics to be fully understood. Thus, this work is not intended as an introductory book. However, I strongly recommend it for instructors and researchers in computer graphics. The field benefits from good theoretical books such as this, and I look forward to a simplified version that would be appropriate for an introductory course in computer graphics.

 

 

- C. Delrieux, Bahia Blanca, Argentina


Visgraf Laboratory | Morph Page | About the site | Mail