MIT

I have to admit that I read this book many years ago. This is not a book that should be read as a way to keep oneself updated on the latest research in the field. It should be seen as a comprehensive, but systematic introduction to basic machine vision techniques. As such, it is a great book, maybe a classic. Its focus is on such topics as Binary Image Processing, Optics, Image formation, Transforms, Filtering, Stereo vision, Optical flow, Noise reduction, etc. It is well organized, and it covers the fundamentals of many useful techniques.

When I first picked up Robot Vision, I was a bit concerned at the age of the book: the field of computer/machine/robot vision progresses at a fantastic pace, and it would seem a given that such a book would be so out of date as to be useless.

However, while this book might not reflect the latest research, especially the tight interweaving of computer graphics and computer vision as exists now or in areas such as active vision, it is a rich presentation of the core ideas of machine vision. In particular, it provides a mathematically rigorous presentation, focusing on core notions of geometric optics and calibration, as well as classic approaches to segmentation, edge detection, signal filtering, and the like.

I would strongly suggest this book as a text that every serious computer vision, robotics, or computer graphics researcher should own; of course, it isn't the _only_ book you should own, and the bibliography certainly won't let you in on the latest trends in vision. Nonetheless, I think the book is so well written that it will remain useful for many years to come.

I had a great time reading about the impressive men and women who had a hand in starting the MIT Rugby Football Club. The book reinforced my respect for the way rugby brings people from all walks of life together. Check it out!

Bill Kreamer
MITRFC member since 1997

MIT is famous for mny things; athletics isn't one of them. Back in 1948. LIFE Magazine wrote about college rugby week, a tourist promotion to bring Ivy League athletes to Bermuda along with their girl friends. Two MIT graduate students who had played rugby in England (one of them my brother) thought it would be cool to go to Bermuda and formed a rugby club. Then as now, MIT has a varied population from all over the world. They recruited expatriate students who had played rugby abroad, and Americans who had played football and wanted energetic exercise.
At the club's 50th reunion, the members decided to create this history, and hired me to write it because I had played in the first match and would be cheap. The founders turned out to be a remarkable group of rascals, who tell their history in their own words-in industry, teaching, the military and CIA, consulting, architecture, the law, and sometimes more than one of the above. The club today is the largets of MIT's club sports, fields three teams, and there is an active women's rugby club as well.
Oh yes, MIT was invited to Bermuda in the spring of 1950!

"Die Krabbe mit den Goldenen Scheren" ("The Crab with the Golden Claws") has a simple beginning when Struppi goes scavenging in the rubbish and gets his muzzle stuck in a can of crabmeat. However, that crab of tin meat quickly leads our hero on a new adventure, which starts off rather horribly when Tintin is knocked unconscious aboard a mysterious ship and taken out to sea where the bad guys intend to send him to the bottom. Of course, Tintin leads a charmed life, which takes a major turn for the better when he comes across the ship's lowly drunken captain, who introduces himself as Captain Haddock.

The rest, as they say, is history, because this is the first of many adventures for Tintin and the character who, along with the omnipresent Struppi, becomes his almost constant companion in the years to come. Even though this is the good captain in his rawest form, Hergé knew he was onto something with the emotional, blustering, cursing (in his own peculiar way) Haddock, who plays increasingly pivotal roles in the next Tintin adventures, "Der Geheimnisvolle Stern" and "Das Geheimnis der Einhorn ." As for Struppi, he does manage to find some of the biggest bones in his long career in this particular adventure, which makes him pretty happy.

"Die Krabbe mit den Goldenen Scheren" takes Tintin and his companions from the perils of the high sea to the burning sands of the desert. Of course, all those cans of crab are not actually filled with crab. This 1941 story is a traditional exotic adventure for our interpid young reporter, filled with slapstick and narrow escapes in equal measure, which might indicate Hergé's understandable desire to forget about what was happening in Europe at that point in history.

This reference describes a computer architecture containing thousands of processor/memory cells that can be connected together by software, and the rational behind this architecture. It is easy to read, and is useful in providing the general reader with a feel for large multiple processor computation, in particular an architecture well suited for semantic network marker propagation.

Shepheard's book is among the most exciting I have read in a very long time--even though I still don't quite know what it is. Is it what, as a university press publication, one might suppose it to be, a work of "scholarship"? is it instead, as, having read it, I now almost think, a very nearly poetic meditation on the interactions between human beings and their environment? I can say neither with certainty. What it is, "certainly," is a set of essays that consider, among other things, what "wilderness" might mean to the human beings who interact with, live in, or stamp their presence over it; the seven wonders of the ancient world; the human presence in Antactica; Scotland; Flevoland and the Dutch polders; the relationship between London and its surroundings; and--in its last chapter--the western front. Each essay is characterized first and foremost by the author's idiosyncratic and playful voice. He writes like a cranky and opinionated human being speaking to other human beings, not like an academic ghost-in-the-book-as-machine addressing some equally dessicated conception of an academic reader. The essays are shot through with conversations (invented? recorded?), little dramas, vignettes, and a basketful of other irrelevancies--although they never turn out to be as irrelevant as you suppose. Each is also characterized by flashes of insight that strike you like lightbulbs going off at unpredictable intervals, page after page. Many years ago, an English professor named Robert Stevick wrote an essay attempting to define the "form" of a genre called "the anatomy." It had, back then, recently been made "famous" all over again by a Canadian name of Frye. Stevick's examples, as I recall, included not only melancholick Burton, more or less obviously, but also Swift's Tale of a Tub, Tristram Shandy, Sartor Resartus, Moby Dick, A la recherche du temps perdus, and Ulysses. At an MLA meeting in the late 1970s, I proposed that Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time would be better understood in reference to this genre than if it were read (as it usually is) against the standards of realistic fiction; I still believe this argument is worth making in a more formal way than I did then, as an aside in a different argument, or here, as an assertion. Whatever else it may be, Shepheard's Cultivated Wilderness is the most recent major contribution to the anatomy genre I have come across. I also think it is simply brilliant. My pleasure in the book sent me looking, the day I finished it, for Shepheard's first book, What is Architecture? An Essay on Landscapes, Buildings, and Machines (MIT Press, 1994; paperback $9.95). I took me twenty-four hours to find a copy, which proved a bit frustrating. When I finally got my mitts on it, this earlier book also won me over. Art is everywhere [Shepheard writes]. As life has become detached from the wilderness, the human world is everywhere. I see music as a throbbing accompaniment to every moment of contemporary life, a sort of continuous current of emotion, that incorporates what poetry used to be. I see drama as a hugely expanded art that includes films and novels, which even has a new name, literature, and sucks in clothes and manners to itself as well. Architecture? Would we not all agree that architecture is much more than tombs and palaces and temples now? (p. 36) Do "we" all agree? Well, maybe yes . . . and maybe no. Page after page is filled with stuff that gets the ol' mental juices going, exciting agreement, provoking argument and disagreement, and inciting the reader to thought. If there is more to ask of a book, I am not sure what it is.

A very touching narrative about the German pilot, great admirer of Saint-Ex, who tried to save his life on July 31, 1944. The story finally puts an end to all the "suppositions" of the press, and gives us a plausible explanation of the demise of the great French writer.
The German illustrations are definitely an improvement on the ones published in the bilingual edition of Vermillon Press. A must reading for all those who think that war is a senseless enterprise. An outstanding demonstration of what faith and the belief in God can do to a warrior. Ian Cameron, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MIchigan.

Although terribly expensive, Huebner's monograph is a remarkable achievement because it is the first one in living memory to analyze the little known relations between two early Christian heresies - Monarchianism and Gnosticism. They embodied two absolutely opposing principles, monism and dualism, with mainstream Christianity fluctuating between them. Arianism which shook most of the 4th century most probably sprang up as a Alexandrian reaction against Monarchianism but, in spite of some similarities with Gnosticism, it is a quite a different phenomenon. To sum up, Huebner's book which should be translated into English and other languages is a very important contribution to the current debate about the religious and cultural situation in late Antiquity.

This book is among the first to apply complexity theory to developmental psychology, and is definitely a must read for anyone interested in either topic. When read in conjunction with Port and Van Gelder's Mind as Motion, Walter Freeman's How Brains Make Up Their Minds, and Alicia Juarrero's Dynamics in Action, one begins to see aborning the outline of a new framework for a naturalized philosophy of mind.

Deep, well-thought-out, analytical. A must for anyone who has an interest in how public space is used.

I read this book because Michael Spivak recommended it in his "Calculus" (another 5 star book). Good books on analysis can be hard to find (Bressoud's "A Radical Approach to Real Analysis", Stephen Abbot's "Understanding Analysis" being two). Edmund Landau's beautifully complete works on Calculus and Analysis are rare finds indeed. Landau's careful and cogent development of mathematical concepts is worth the price of a book, alone. Unfortunately, as far as I am able to determine this book is no longer available in English. No problem - this edition includes a complete glossary of mathematical terms...mathematicians should be able to read German, Russian, and, if possible, Japanese and Chinese because so many works of importance are published in these languages. The German necessary to get through a book like this is not that hard to pick up - especially when the editors have made it so convenient.