The sixth edition of this worldwide used textbook was thoroughly - vised and extended. Throughout the whole text you will ?nd numerous improvements, extensions, and updates. Above all, I would like to draw your attention to two major changes. Firstly, the whole textbook is now clearly partitioned into basic and advanced material in order to cope with the ever-increasing ?eld of di- talimageprocessing. Themostimportantequationsareputintoframed boxes. The advanced sections are located in the second part of each chapter and are marked by italic headlines and by a smaller typeface. In this way, you can ?rst work your way through the basic principles of digital image processing without getting overwhelmed by the wealth of the material. You can extend your studies later to selected topics of interest.

The second most notable extension are exercises that are now - cluded at the end of each chapter. These exercise help you to test your understanding, train your skills, and introduce you to real-world image processing tasks. The exercises are marked with one to three stars to indicate their di?culty. An important part of the exercises is a wealth of interactive computer exercises, which cover all topics of this te- book. These exercises are performed with the image processing so- ware heurisko(R) (http: //www. heurisko. de), which is included on the accompanying CD-ROM. In this way you can get own practical expe- ence with almost all topics and algorithms covered by this book.