Algorithms, methods, and standards in the area of image processing are the topics covered in this book. The book starts with an introduction to the image interchange standard TIFF, halftoning techniques, and histogram-based image enhancement. Next, edge detection and spatial filtering techniques are presented. Median filtering; image operations (arithmetic and geometric) including flipping the image; and cut-and-paste techniques come next. Phillips treats the subject of segmenting images based on either histogram information (thresholding and region growing) or edge information. Mathematical morphology is represented by erosion and dilation methods, and opening, closing, outlining, and thinning algorithms. An almost complete set of Boolean operations including overlays completes the theory. Pictures illustrate most of the techniques applied. The text is enormously extended by the C programs presented: two-thirds of the book consists of C code. Printing out the programs in this detail seems useless when a disk is included as well.

A number of appendices, covering makefiles, programs, function lists, an algorithm index, and C compilers appear at the end of the book. The book also contains a bibliography and an index.

This book is more of a cookbook than a textbook. The theory presented is superficial, too brief, and hardly coherent. Image analysis is not really covered except for some loose techniques. The book certainly is not useful as a college text.

Methods described in the book about how to cope with small amounts of memory are very outdated by now. The author seems to be writing for owners of mid-1980s PCs.

The part about the Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) is about the only good thing about the book. My evaluation of the book as a whole is unfavorable: it has too many loose ends, is superficial theoretically, has too much page filler, and is outdated.

People can easily find better books than this one, and they should use more modern computers to play around with images.