Book

Our computer vision textbook is finished!

Lots of things have happened since we started thinking about this book in November 2010; yes, it has taken us more than 10 years to write this book. Our initial goal was to write a large book that provided a good coverage of the field. Unfortunately, the field of computer vision is just too large for that. So, we decided to write a small book instead, limiting each chapter to no more than five pages. Writing a short book was perfect because we did not have time to write a long book and you did not have time to read it. Unfortunately, we have failed at that goal, too. This book covers foundational topics within computer vision, with an image processing and machine learning perspective. The audience is undergraduate and graduate students who are entering the field, but we hope experienced practitioners will find the book valuable as well.

Foundations of Computer Vision
Antonio Torralba, Phillip Isola, William F. Freeman
MIT Press


A free online version of the book is here: visionbook.mit.edu

(Note that the online version is a work in progress and many figures are not formatted as nicely as in the actual book.)



Although the main focus of this book is on computer vision, it also can function as an introduction to deep learning, and I use it to teach deep learning at MIT. If you would like to use it for that purpose, I recommend this progression of chapters:

  1. Chapter 9: Introduction to Learning
  2. Chapter 10: Gradient-Based Learning Algorithms
  3. Chapter 11: The Problem of Generalization
  4. Chapter 12: Neural Networks
  5. Chapter 13: Neural Networks as Distribution Transformers
  6. Chapter 14: Backpropagation
  7. Chapter 24: Convolutional Neural Nets
  8. Chapter 25: Recurrent Neural Nets
  9. Chapter 26: Transformers
  10. Chapter 30: Representation Learning
  11. Chapter 32: Generative Models
  12. Chapter 33: Generative Modeling Meets Representation Learning
  13. Chapter 34: Conditional Generative Models
  14. Chapter 37: Transfer Learning and Adaptation
  15. Chapter 51: Vision and Language

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