Introductory Chapter: Computer Graphics and Imaging

Computer graphics is one of the generational changes in computer technology. Its development is so stormy that it has expanded from precious devices designed for military and top industrial applications to schools and households as a common information medium and a medium of education and entertainment. The history of modern computer graphics began to be written after the Second World War. Thenceforth, the area characterized as an area of technical and natural sciences dealing with the graphical information processing using a computer was named computer graphics. The graphical information is much more intelligible and clear for human than, for example, information in numerical form. A computer graphics affects our daily live. Computer graphics helped to mass-expand computers, and it removed the barriers that ordinary people feel when working with them [1] (they are “flooded” with columns of numbers and text and they are drawn into a world where they cannot be orientated oneself). As can be seen from the previous words, human evolution is tied to the process of collecting, processing, transferring, and recording of information. If we add that most people are gaining the most information by sight, then modern computers are already greatly helping them. However, the history of computer graphics dates back much earlier. Already Johannes Gutenberg discovered and introduced the basic technology of human information transfer—letterpress, in the years 1444–1448. Genius Leonardo da Vinci examined relationships of science and art around the same period (1452– 1515). Joseph Marie Jacquard introduced a loom controlled by punch cards (“a printer predecessor?”) in the years 1805–1808. But W. B. Hales created the first analog computer drawings in the years 1944–1945. Ivan Moscovich designed a drawing machine in 1951. A year later, Ben F. Laposky exposed analog computer graphics in Cherokee Sanford Museum in the USA. Then more and more attention was paid to computer graphics, and the result is already well known in present. Yes, this is the evolution of the computer graphics phenomenon. The phenomena that are increasingly gaining interest in the eyes of the lay public are the following: