Introduction

As we have already mentioned in the preface, increasing demands on production quality and documentation have made digital image processing one of the key technologies of modern manufacturing. Nevertheless, its industrial application is not yet commonplace, especially because of a lack of understanding for this relatively young technology. This book was written in order to remedy this condition, which was in part created by the image processing industry itself. As with all areas in which PCs are increasingly used, a trend to give the user more possibilities for application development became apparent in image processing. This makes it also necessary to equip the user with adequate know-how.