I am looking for a recommendation for an introduction to image processing algorithms (face and shape recognition, etc.) and wondered if anyone had an good recommendations, either for books, whitepapers or websites.
I am starting from knowing very little about image recognition and did some maths at University (a long time ago).
Any help or pointers would be greatly appreciated.
I found this blog very helpful.
There are quite a lot of topics related to CV that you might want to read up on.
Some of the topics:
The two books that are pretty good on this subject are:
I used the CV: A modern approach for a CV class I took a semester or two ago. It is fairly concise and includes explanations of how the techniques work. Its not for the faint of heart. Also: Forsyth is a well known author of many CV Papers.
MIT OpenCourseWare has an image recognition course. Unfortunately, there are no video lectures for this course yet, but you'll find lecture notes and other materials.
Be aware that Computer Vision is in general very math heavy, so if you feel that your linear algebra skills are not up to date, then update them before attempting to read anything. Knowing your way around some basic signal processing will also be of great help.
For basic shape recognition like lines and circles an edge detector coupled with a simple(?) Hough transform could be enough to do the trick.
If you want to find other stuff that is not faces or basic shapes (cars, people, ...) then you are in for some really heavy reading as this is a quite large area of research with lots of different methods for feature extraction and classification.
If you want to look at faces only, then I suggest finding literature that deals with this specifically to not drown in a sea of math heavy information.
Here is a great book that you can download for free. http://szeliski.org/Book/