The four chapters that make up this volume are all concerned, though in very different ways, with image handling, image processing, and image interpretation. The first contribution, which comes from Moscow, should help Western scientists to appreciate the amount of activity in digital optics in the Soviet Union. The extent of this is not always realized, for despite translation programs, some of it is not readily accessible and little is presented at conferences in Europe, the United States, and Japan. I hope that L. P. Yaroslavskii’s chapter will help to correct the perspective where necessary. V. Cappellini needs no introduction to the electrical engineering community; here he surveys the difficult but very active and important fields of digital filtering in two dimensions and source coding. The list of applications in the concluding section shows the wide range of application of these ideas. The third chapter is concerned with the extremely delicate problem of radiation damage and image interpretation in electron microscopy. For some years, it has been realized, with dismay, that some specimens of great biological importance are destroyed in the electron microscope by the electron dose needed to generate a usable image. One solution is to accumulate very low dose images by computer image manipulation, but a thorough knowledge of image statistics is imperative for this, as indeed it is for other types of electron image processing. This difficult area remained largely uncharted territory until С. H. Slump and H. A. Ferwerda began to explore it in detail: their chapter here gives a very full account of their findings and sheds much light more indeed than I suspect they dared to hope when they began—on this forbidding subject. The final chapter, by A. D. Kulkarni, is concerned with yet another branch of this vast subject, in particular with enhancement and image analysis. This should be a very helpful supplement to the basic material to be found in the standard textbooks on the subject.