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Course Objectives

Prerequisites

Approach

Typical Text

Course Outline

Course Objectives
The objective of COMP 235 is provide a common introduction to studies in computer graphics, image analysis, and vision to be followed by COMP 236/238 for graphics, and COMP 254/255 for image analysis, and COMP 277 for vision.

Prerequisites
COMP 121 and MATH 83

Approach
Rationale: The continuing unification of graphics and image analysis means that students in either area must know a growing common core of material to be effective contributors to their field. Factoring this material out of COMP 236 and COMP 254 will ensure that students on both sides of the cluster become familiar with this core material and would allow those courses to provide a more complete introduction to their areas. COMP 238 and COMP 255 may then be upgraded to research preparation courses.

Typical Text
Glassner, Principles of Digital Image Synthesis

Coggins, James M., Images, Graphics, and Vision (unpublished MS available from the author)

Course Outline

Display and 2D Graphics (2 weeks)
Students will implement procedures for creating an abstract image, displaying an image, and drawing lines in an image.

• Operation of CRT
  • electron guns, scan lines, interlacing, NTSC and PAL standards
• Color lookup tables vs. "true color" displays
• Dithered display
• Windowing systems and graphical user interfaces
• Image display on workstations
• Basic image manipulations
  • setting and retrieving pixels
  • linear and log scaling, intensity windowing, the histogram
• Drawing lines and text
  • color, font, line width, line style, text direction, orientation
• Scan conversion of lines into an image

Foundations of 3D Computer Graphics (4 weeks)
This section covers the basic mathematics for 3D rendering. Students will implement code for rendering a single 3D object as a wireframe without clipping.

• Points and vectors, polylines and polygons
• Dot product, orthogonality, change of coordinate systems, Matrix multiplication
• Transformation matrices; Homogeneous coordinates translation, scaling, rotation
• Cross product
• A simple viewing model
• Viewing transformations
• Projections
  • parallel and perspective
• 3D wire frame rendering
• Hierarchical polygonal modeling
• Basic lighting and shading
  • interactions of energy and matter
  • illumination by light, X-rays, ultrasound, seismic waves
  • ambient, diffuse, specular reflections
• Geometry
  • planes, normal vectors, tangent vectors, Frenet frames, curvature, parametric equations for lines and planes; computing intersections
  • parametric cubic curves (1D curves in 3-space only)

Foundations of Image Analysis (3 weeks)
This section will enable students to understand the Fourier transform, filtering, sampling and aliasing, resampling and linear interpolation, the Gaussian and its role in scale, and the geometrical and scale structure of images. Students will implement filters, exchange the magnitude and phase parts of two images, experiment with sampling, aliasing, and antialiasing, and blur images with a series of derivatives of Gaussians.

• Generalizing coordinate systems to functions
• Orthonormal basis functions
• The Fourier series
• The Fourier transform
• The discrete Fourier transform
• The fast discrete Fourier transform algorithm
• Sampling
• Reconstruction
• Aliasing
• Aliasing in 2D images
• Antialiasing techniques
• The Gaussian and its derivatives
• Filtering and its effect on images

Foundations of Vision (3 weeks)
This section provides an introduction to the anatomy and psychophysics of the human visual system and introduces the notion of visual models relating to scale. Students will implement a color modeling program and will label local maxima and minima in blurred images.

• Structure of the human visual system
• Psychophysics: brightness, color, motion, stereo, shape from X
• Psychophysical experiments
• Display linearization and jnd's
• Illusions
• Color models
• Scale in vision