"Nobody opens the book at my page, yet every serious reader arrives here eventually, usually mid-derivation and in a hurry. I am consulted far more often than I am read, and I have made my peace with that."
A Frequently Consulted Lookup Table
The four parts are the story; this shelf is everything that supports it. Six appendices condense the mathematics, the data, the teaching plans, the reading routes, the hardware knowledge that the thirty-nine chapters draw on, and the roster of agents that wrote them, and the capstone project is where the whole arc converges into one working system. None of it is meant to be read in order; all of it is meant to be found quickly.
1. What the Appendices Offer
The four parts of this book are written to be read in order; the appendices are written to be opened at any moment. They are the reference shelf behind the narrative: the place you turn when Chapter 4's Fourier machinery deserves a slower derivation, when a detector in Part III needs a benchmark to train against, or when a prototype is ready to leave the workstation and meet a real camera. Nothing in them advances the plot. Each one condenses material the chapters rely on into a form built for lookup, with definitions, tables, schedules, and checklists where the parts use story and code.
Use them alongside the parts rather than after them. Keep Appendix A within reach through the mathematical stretches of Part I and the geometry of Part II; it carries the linear algebra, probability, optimization, and signal processing the derivations assume. Open Appendix B whenever an experiment in Part III needs training data or a fair point of comparison. If you teach from this book, Appendix C offers week-by-week plans assembled from the chapters; if you are charting your own route, Appendix D orders the chapters around your goal before you commit the hours. Appendix E covers the physical end of the stack, from sensors and lenses to GPUs and edge boxes, for the day the software ships as part of a machine. And when the Part IV finale leaves you wanting one project that exercises everything at once, the capstone is that project.
2. The Six Appendices
The six cards below mirror the Appendices entries in the Table of Contents; each links to the landing page of its appendix.
The essential linear algebra, probability, optimization, and signal processing behind every chapter. Refresh a concept in minutes, then return to the chapter that sent you here.
A per-task reference: classification, detection, segmentation, geometry, flow, video, and generation benchmarks, with licensing notes. Consult it whenever a project needs data or a fair baseline.
Tested course tracks built from the book: a one-semester image processing and classical CV course, a deep vision course, and a generative vision course, with week-by-week schedules.
Per-audience reading guides for engineers, researchers, generative-AI practitioners, and self-study learners. Pick the pathway that matches your goal and let it order the chapters for you.
Choosing sensors, lenses, GPUs, and edge devices for vision workloads, from lab prototypes to production lines. The hardware companion to the image formation, calibration, and deployment chapters.
The roster of 42 specialist AI agents in the writing pipeline that produced this manuscript, one card per agent: who they are, what slice of quality they own, and the question each one asks of every chapter.
3. The Capstone Project
Where the appendices look backward over the book as reference, the capstone looks forward: it is the one place where the skills of all four parts are exercised together, in a single system you design, defend, and ship.
Design, build, evaluate, and present a production-grade vision application that spans all four parts: classical preprocessing and geometry, a fine-tuned detector or segmenter, a generative synthetic-data engine, and honest evaluation with deployment.
Finding Your Way Back
From here you can browse the full Table of Contents to jump to any chapter, or return to the book cover for the four-part overview. If you arrived from a chapter, the appendix you need is one card away; take what you came for and pick the story back up where you left it.