electrical and optical

This is it. All you need to know about imaging. If you are in any doubt, just buy it!

This book reads like a user manual for an engineering image processing toolkit. In fact, that is exactly what it is -- the author sells a companion CD that is a set of image processing plug-ins to PhotoShop. However, you will not need to buy his toolkit to find this book valuable. Any image processing package that you use will be of greater use to you if you have this book at your side. The important thing to realize is that this is a handbook for technical USERS. It is not a programming manual for how to implement the techniques it discusses, but a very high-quality discussion of what the techniques are and when and why you would use them. Within that domain, the book has remarkable depth and clarity. It is quite up-to-date in its coverage, and draws extensively from real-world applications in medicine, microscopy, and satellite imaging. If you need to develop image processing procedures in your work as an engineer, you will want to have this book by your side.

If you are primarily interested in remote sensing aspects of image processing (e.g., satellite and airborne imagery of the ground). I recommend acquiring this handbook on image processing. By far the best handbook on general Image Processing is "The Image Processing Handbook" edited by Russ and published by the IEEE. I use this book all the time. Of course, if you are getting into specific areas, such as mapping, hyperspectral imagery, synthetic aperature radar imagery or photogrammetry (i.e., precise physical measurement from imagery), or if you have a specific application (such as deforestation or plant diseases or agriculture), you should consider separate books on those topics.