• How much should you compress this photo? Do you care more about file size or
image detail? Is this a snapshot or a technical photograph?
Algorithms can help us with many of these tasks. (They cannot help us take our
photos on a perfect Utah evening unless we rely on surveillance cameras that
continually monitor everywhere and everything.) But algorithms can help us take
better photos and videos:
• Early-stage operations such as autofocu s, autoexposure, and auto white balance
• Image enhancements such as sharpening and keystone correction or, in the case
of video, stabilization
• Composite photographs such as high-dynamic range (HDR) and mosaics
This book is intended to walk through the major operations in digital photogra-
phy and to understand the trade-offs in the design of camera systems.
1.7 How to Read this Book
This book was writte n to address a range of readers who may have diverse
backgrounds. I believe that the topics in the b ook are important for a full under-
standing of smart camera design, but not everyone may have the same depth of
interest in all of these topics. I have tried to arrange the subsections within sections
so that the major concepts of a section can be grasped without necessarily resorting
to all the necessary details.
All technical people interested in digital camera s and photography should, in my
opinion, have at least a basic appreciation of the arts of photography and cinema-
tography. Over the years, I have found the fields of computer music vs. image
processing and computer vision to be populated by very different types of people.
Computer music people are invariably musicians who have a deep, intuitive sense
of what they want to accomplish with their designs. Im age processing and computer
vision specialists, in contrast, rarely have even a basic understanding of the
photographic arts. I think that an appreciation of how we use photos is at the
heart of autoprevisualization and essential to a truly in-depth understanding of
digital camera design. A corollary is that a fair amount of the technical material
required to understand digital camera design is not unique to digital. Optics and the
physics of light still apply in the digital domain.
The chapters are designed to explore different aspects of digital cameras:
• Chapter 2, Light, Optics, and Imaging, examines how images are formed and
displayed. It looks at the nature of light, optics, and the human visual system . It
also considers the more practical aspec ts of image capture, leading to a discus-
sion of previsualization.
• Chapter 3, Image Capture Systems and Algorithms, studies the design of cameras
as machines. We consider optics, image sensors, cameras as multiprocessors,
and the basic operations required to automate the photographic process. We also
1.7 How to Read this Book 5