The Hypermedia Image Processing Reference (HIPR) was developed at the Department of Artificial Intelligence in the University of Edinburgh in order to provide a set of computer-based tutorial materials for use in taught courses on image processing and machine vision.

The package provides on-line reference and tutorial information on a wide range of image processing operations, extensively illustrated with actual digitized images, and bound together in a hypermedia format for easy browsing, searching and cross-referencing. Amongst the features offered by HIPR are:

1. Reference information on around 50 of the most common classes of image processing operations in use today.
2. Detailed descriptions of how each operation works.
3. Guidelines for the use of each operation, including their particular advantages and disadvantages, and suggestions as to when they are appropriate.
4. Example input and output images for each operation illustrating typical results. The images are viewable on screen and are also available to the student as an image library for further exploration using an image processing package.
5. A large number of student exercises.
6. Encyclopedic glossary of common image processing concepts and terms, cross-referenced with the image processing operation reference.
7. Bibliographic information.
8. Tables of equivalent operators for several common image processing packages: VISILOG, Khoros, the Matlab image processing toolbox and HIPS.
9. Software and detailed instructions for editing and extending the structure of HIPR.

The motivation behind HIPR is to bridge the gap between image processing textbooks which provide good technical detail, but do not generally provide very high quality or indeed very many example images; and image processing software packages which readily provide plenty of interactivity with real images and real computers, but often lack much in the way of a tutorial component.

By providing example input and output images for all the image processing operations covered, and making these easily available to the student through the use of hypermedia, HIPR presents image processing in a much more `hands on' fashion than is traditional. It is the authors' belief that this approach is essential for gaining real understanding of what can be done with image processing. In addition, the use of hypertext structure allows the reference to be efficiently searched, and cross-references can be followed at the click of a mouse button. Since the package can easily be provided over a local area network, the information is readily available at any suitably equipped computer connected to that network.

Another important goal of the package was that it should be usable by people using almost any sort of computer platform, so much consideration has been given to portability issues. The package should be suitable for many machine architectures and operating systems, including UNIX workstations, PC/Windows and Apple Macintosh.

Users will need access to Netscape or a similar HTML viewer, but HIPR is designed for multiplatform use (including UNIX, PC/Windows and Apple Mac). HIPR, as an HTML-based resource, is well-suited for local area network use.

ISO 9660 compatible CD-ROM drive (for installation)

75MB disk storage

Greyscale or color monitor (color preferred)

Mouse

Note: Access to an image processing software package (such as Khoros or Visilog) is required for further processing of HIPR's example images.

Although HIPR can be run directly from the installation CD-ROM the package is intended for local area network use. If you wish to use HIPR in a networked configuration, a site license must be purchased from the Publisher. The license restricts the range of access to a specified site. It is prohibited to make HIPR available over the WWW outside the licensed site.

A site is defined as a single academic department of a university, college or other school of learning, where all taught courses fall within a single subject discipline. A license for networking the product by multiple academic departments or by a commercial organization is available on application. There is no limit to the number of users at a licensed site or to the term of the site license.

Robert Fisher, Simon Perkins, Ashley Walker, Erik Wolfart

University of Edinburgh, UK