Humans still obtain the vast majority of their sensory input through their visual system, and an enormous effort has been made to artificially enhance this sense. Eyeglasses, binoculars, telescopes, radar, infrared sensors, and photomultipliers all function to improve our view of the world and the universe. We even have telescopes in orbit...

Computer vision is an engineering discipline; we are primarily motivated by the real-world concern of...

Organizing things is an important human activity. Whether it is a child organizing toys in some way (by size, color, favorites, and so forth) or an adult piecing together a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, the desire to “make order out of chaos” (as one inveterate puzzler put it) reflects a sense that somehow if...

When I was 10 years old, I purchased an introductory electronics book at a local pharmacy. I cherished this book because I knew it contained marvelous and fascinating knowledge about electronics—an awesome, mysterious, and exciting field that was to become the literal foundation of the next step in human progress. Unfortunately, after...