Publisher's Synopsis
Encyclopaedia of Advanced Image Acquisition, Processing Techniques and Applications is a compendium of re¬views, original research papers, communications, case reports, in all fields of imaging research, striving to incorporate technological innovations and technical methods and approaches covering the acquisition, processing and understanding. Topics cover some different aspects of the theory of image restoration, but this book is also an occasion to highlight some new topics of research allied to the advent of some original imaging devices. From this arise some real challenging problems connected to image restoration that open the way to some new fundamental scientific questions closely related with the world we interact with. Digital image restoration has been a field of very active research for many years, and digital image resto¬ration techniques has been put to use in a lot of different contexts including astronomy, medicine, intel¬ligence work and many others. Common to these fields of application is that the restoration techniques are applied to image data of some kind true to the original intentions of the algorithms. In this text we present an application of principles from digital image restoration to the field of coding theory, and the objects of application are not images but rather general information data. Information can be represented in many different ways. A typical approach in information theory is to represent information as binary vectors, but there are many situations where information can rather be represented as a matrix or grid containing the information symbols giving rise to the concept of two-dimensional channels. Good examples of this can be found in the fields of magnetic and optical storage, bar codes and others. When transmitting informa¬tion of any kind, a central problem is how to deal with errors that result from the transmission process, and a solution to this problem is to add redundancy to the information in such a way that it is possible to detect and eventually also correct the errors that occur. Adding this redundancy is called error control coding, and the techniques for doing so is called error correcting or detecting codes. There exists a huge variety of error control coding techniques for channels with different characteristics and for fulfilling dif¬ferent sets of requirements. However, most of the channel coding techniques assumes the information that is to be encoded, are one-dimensional vectors or a stream of information symbols. Channel coding for two-dimensional channels on the other hand, is a part of coding theory that has only recently attracted attention from the coding theory community.
