ISTA 352: Images: Past, Present and Future

A significant portion of the human brain is devoted to understanding spatial data and its relation to the world. Through the ages humans have naturally developed external representations of such information for communication, planning, understanding, and entertainment. Further, the digital age has led to an explosion of images available to everyone in forms that are convenient to share, manipulate, and automatically mine for information. In this thematic course we will study images from perspectives that transcend disciplines, and applicable to many of them, including the arts, science and biomedicine, computational intelligence, geography, and security. We will study what images are, how images are stored and distributed, the reproduction of images, how they can be manipulated, using images for visualization, and extracting semantics from images.