 facsimile, the technology has diverged into a collection of visually ori- ented applications that include video and virtual reality. Driven by aggressive demands from sophisticated, applications-hungry users and fueled by network and computer technologies capable of delivering such bandwidth-and-processor-intensive services, the telecommunications industry has undergone a remarkable metamorphosis as industry play- ers battle for the pole position. Why this rapid growth? Curt Carlson, vice president of information systems at the David Sarnoff Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, observes that more than half of the human brain is devoted to vision-related functions-an indication that vision is our single most important sense. He believes that this rapid evolution in image-based systems is occurring because these are the systems that people actu- ally need. "First we invented radio," he observes, "then we invented television. Now we are entering what we call the age of interactivity, in which we merge all of those technologies and add the element of user inter- action. Vision is one of the key elements that allow us to create these exciting new applications." Indeed, many new applications depend on the interactive component of image-based technologies. Medical imaging, interactive customer service applications, and multimedia education are but a few. Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. Premises Technologies Chapter 5 Still Images Still-image applications have been in widespread use for quite some time. Initially, there were photocopy machines. They did not provide stor- age of documents nor did they offer the ability to electronically transport them from one place to another. That capability arrived on a limited basis with the fax machine. While a fax transmission allows a document to be moved from one location to another, 