Markov Point Processes And Their Applications

These days, an increasing amount of information can be obtained in graphical forms, such as weather maps, soil samples, locations of nests in a breeding colony, microscopical slices, satellite images, radar or medical scans and X-ray techniques. "e;High level"e; image analysis is concerned with the global interpretation of images, attempting to reduce it to a compact description of the salient features of the scene.This book takes a stochastic approach. It studies Markov object processes, showing that they form a flexible class of models for a range of problems involving the interpretation of spatial data. Applications can be found in statistical physics (under the name of "e;Gibbs processes"e;), environmental mapping of diseases, forestry, identification of ore structure in materials science, signal analysis, object recognition, robot vision, and interpretation of images from medical scans or confocal microscopy.