Digital Image Processing

That's a tough call. It's hard to tell if I can understand the concepts from that along after already read and studied DIP. You may want to pick up the 2.ed of DIP if your concern is price. I learned from 2.ed of DIP, and not sure if 3.ed is worth $60+ more.

For that I suggest "Feature Extraction and Image Processing" 2.ed by Mark Nixon and Alberto S Aguado. But "Digital Image Processing" (DIP) by Gonzalez and Woods as suggested by monk_the_dog is pretty much the standard prereq. Actually DIP may get you what you need depending on how deep you need to go.

Here's my list: For a general introduction: * "Digital Image Processing" by Gonzalez and Woods * "Image Processing, Analysis, and Machine Vision" by Sonka, Hlavac, and Boyle After you learn the basics, some more advanced and specialized books I'd recommend: * "Morphological Image Analysis" by Soille. * "Insight into Images" by Yoo (explains many of the algorithms in the ITK library). I hesitate to recommend this book because it is so dated (1992), but I refer to "Computer and Robot Vision" by Haralick and Shapiro quite often.