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Vision deals with the problem of deriving information about the world from the light reflected from it. Although the active and task-oriented nature of vision is only implicit in this formulation, this view captures several of the essential aspects of vision. As Marr (1982) phrased it in his book Vision, vision is an information processing task, in which an internal representation of information is of out-most importance. Only by representation information can be captured and made available to decision processes. The purpose of a representation is to make certain aspects of the information content explicit, that is, immediately accessible without any need for additional processing.

This introductory chapter deals with a fundamental aspect of early image representation-the notion of scale. As Koenderink (1984) emphasizes, the problem of scale must be faced in any imaging situation. An inherent property of objects in the world and …