Computer vision is becoming increasingly important in several industrial applications such as automated inspection, robotic manipulations and autonomous vehicle guidance. These tasks are performed in a 3-D world and it is imperative to gather reliable information on the 3-D structure of the scene. This book is about passive techniques for depth recovery, where the scene is illuminated only by natural light as opposed to active methods where a special lighting device is used for scene illumination. Passive methods have a wider range of applicability and also correspond to the way humans infer 3-D structure from visual images.
