Image Processing in Italy: A First Report

Pattern recognition and image processing started in Italy from two academic sources: the physicists from the Faculty of Sciences, and engineers from the Department of Electronics, around the year 1960. Although the motivations were different, they both considered some theoretical problems concerning the possibility of designing machines that would “recognize” shapes, and of solving practical problems such as efficient OCR, biomedical image analysis, noise cleaning by filtering, as well as some novel applications in the fields of archaeology, ecology and landscape preservation.