Color perception plays an important role in object recognition and scene
understanding both for humans and intelligent vision systems. Recent
advances in digital color imaging and computer hardware technology have
led to an explosion in the use of color images in a variety of
applications including medical imaging, content-based image retrieval,
biometrics, watermarking, digital inpainting, remote sensing, visual
quality inspection, among many others. As a result, automated processing
and analysis of color images has become an active area of research, to
which the large number of publications of the past two decades bears
witness. The multivariate nature of color image data presents new
challenges for researchers and practitioners as the numerous methods
developed for single channel images are often not directly applicable to
multichannel ones. The goal of this volume is to summarize the
state-of-the-art in the early stages of the color image processing
pipeline.