Throughout much of machine vision's early years the infrared imagery has suffered from return on investment despite its advantages over visual counterparts. Recently, the ?scal momentum has switched in favor of both manufacturers and practitioners of infrared technology as a result of today's rising security and safety challenges and advances in thermographic sensors and their continuous drop in costs. This yielded a great impetus in achieving ever better performance in remote surveillance, object recognition, guidance, noncontact medical measurements, and more. The purpose of this book is to draw attention to recent successful efforts made on merging computer vision applications (nonmilitary only) and nonvisual imagery, as well as to ?ll in the need in the literature for an up-to-date convenient reference on machine vision and infrared technologies. Augmented Perception in Infrared provides a comprehensive review of recent deployment of infrared sensors in modern applications of computer vision, along with in-depth description of the world's best machine vision algorithms and intel- gent analytics. Its topics encompass many disciplines of machine vision, including remote sensing, automatic target detection and recognition, background modeling and image segmentation, object tracking, face and facial expression recognition, - variant shape characterization, disparate sensors fusion, noncontact physiological measurements, night vision, and target classi?cation. Its application scope includes homeland security, public transportation, surveillance, medical, and military. Mo- over, this book emphasizes the merging of the aforementioned machine perception applications and nonvisual imaging in intensi?ed, near infrared, thermal infrared, laser, polarimetric, and hyperspectral bands.
