Software eBooks Page 39

This introduction to programming places computer science in the core of a liberal arts education. Unlike other introductory books, it focuses on the program design process. This approach fosters a variety of skills--critical reading, analytical thinking, creative synthesis, and attention to detail--that are important for everyone, not just future computer programmers.The book exposes readers to two fundamentally new ideas. First, it presents program design guidelines that show the reader how to analyze a problem statement; how to formulate concise goals; how to make up examples; how to develop an outline of the solution, based on the analysis; how to finish the program; and how to test. Each step produces a well-defined intermediate product. Second, ...

Two important subproblems of computer vision are the detection and recognition of 2D objects in gray-level images. This book discusses the construction and training of models, computational approaches to efficient implementation, and parallel implementations in biologically plausible neural network architectures. The approach is based on statistical modeling and estimation, with an emphasis on simplicity, transparency, and computational efficiency.The book describes a range of deformable template models, from coarse sparse models involving discrete, fast computations to more finely detailed models based on continuum formulations, involving intensive optimization. Each model is defined in terms of a subset of points on a reference grid (the template),...