For the last 13 years, Richard Alan Peters II, associate professor of electrical engineering at Vanderbilt University, has been polishing and refining the lecture notes for his introductory image processing course. Five years ago, he posted them online, making them freely available to everyone who is interested, and has updated them regularly ever since.
Although the course covers highly specialized topics such as color correction, linear spatial filtering, noise reduction and image rotation, his notes have proven remarkably popular: They have been downloaded more than 100,000 times.
“Three or four years ago I noticed that some of the folks at MIT were posting lectures on the web and making them available for free,” said Peters. He decided to follow suit when he discovered that the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization formed to build an Internet library, would host his material. The only thing he has done to advertise his offering is to put a link to them in the Wikipedia entry on image processing.
The notes consist of PowerPoint slides that are chock full of cartoons, images and diagrams to illustrate the technical information that the lectures cover.
“I get emails from people around the world who are using my notes: It’s quite gratifying,” said Peters.
His course notes are available at http://archive.org/details/Lectures_on_Image_Processing.
By David Salisbury
