For machine vision researchers, the editors of the book compiled a good survey of the field in 2004. The book does not start from scratch, unlike Machine Vision by Davies. Instead, it dives straight into numerous topics, by assuming you are already versed in the basics.
The text has a combination of descriptions of the maths underlining the methods, and the showing of the results from applying the methods.
Some topics are by now fairly mature. Take image based lighting, where scenes are illuminated by one or more light sources. For realistic renderings, the methods described should give very good results.
Face detection, on the other hand, still has ways to go. The chapter on it talks about using Haar feature sets and other ideas. But the chapter may have been somewhat obsoleted by recent [2008] work that used another method that is orders of magnitude faster, though with roughly the same accuracy.