A machine vision system should be able to analyze images and produce descriptions of what it "sees". The descriptions should capture the aspects of the objects being imaged and be useful for accomplishing some specific tasks. In this volume a number of subjects are discussed. They include theoretical aspects which focus on shape analysis, special architectures, 3-D image decomposition, inspection by machine vision, and others. Applications include geophysical image analysis, robotics, sparse image understanding, biomedical applications. An ample survey of the present industrial applications is also provided.