The writing of this book was enabled thanks to financial support from the Czech Science Foundation (project No. 102/08/1593) and from the the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports (Research Center Data-Algorithms-Decision Making, project no. 1M0572).
First of all, we would like to express thanks to our employer, the Institute of Information Theory and Automation (ÚTIA) of the ASCR, Prague, and to the former director of the Institute prof. Milan Mareš, for creating an inspiring and friendly environment and for ongoing support of our research. We also thank both universities where we teach, the Czech Technical University, Faculty of Nuclear Science and Physical Engineering and the Charles University, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, for their support and for administration of all our courses. We would also like to thank the many students in our courses and our tutorial attendees who have asked challenging and stimulating questions.
Special thanks go to the staff of the publisher John Wiley & Sons Limited, namely to Simone Taylor, who encouraged us to start writing the book, to our project editor Nicky Skinner and publishing assistant Alexandra King for their continuous help and patience during the writing period.
Many our colleagues and friends helped us with the preparation of the book in various sense. We are most grateful to all of them, namely to

• Jaroslav Kautsky for his significant contribution to Chapter 4 and willingness to share with us his long-time experience with orthogonal polynomials
• Filip Šroubek for his valuable contribution to Chapter 4,
• Jiří Boldyš for his valuable comments and suggestions on 3D invariants,
• Irena Váňová for performing several experiments used throughout the book and for helping us to create the accompanying web-site,
• Michal Šorel for help with the Optical Flow experiment in Chapter 8,
• Babak Mahdian for his contribution to the Image Forensics experiment in Chapter 8,
• Michal Breznický for his comments on the Gaussian blur invariants,
• Alexander Kutka for his help with the Focus Measure experiment in Chapter 8,
• Jan Kybic for providing us with his code for elastic matching,
• Pavel Šroubek for careful language corrections of the manuscript, 
• Jarmila Pánková for the cover design.

Finally, we would like to thank our families. Their encouragement and patience was instrumental in completing this book.