该文是“中国图像工程”的年度文献综述系列之九。为了使国内广大从事图像工程研究和图像技术应用的科技人员能够较全面地了解国内图像工程研究和发展的现状，并能够方便地查询有关文献，现从国内15种有关图像工程重要中文期刊2003年出版的共108期上发表的2341篇学术研究和技术应用文献中，选取出577篇属于图像工程领域的文献，然后根据各文献的主要内容将其分别归入图像处理、图像分析、图像理解、技术应用和综述5个大类，再进一步分人21个专业小类。在此基础上进行了文献统计和分析。由统计分析结果可见，我国图像工程在2003年又有了许多新进展，除相关的文献数量继续增加，“传统的”图像分割和图像编码领域仍有许多新研究成果外，近年来的几个新的研究热点，如图像数字水印、人脸和器官检测、图像匹配融合、图像和视频检索等继续“升温”。特别值得指出的是，图像工程文献在上述15种期刊上2003年发表的文献中的比例达到一个新的水平，显示了图像工程研究在中国强劲的快速发展势头。

This is the ninth in the survey series of the yearly bibliographies on image engineering in China. The purpose of this survey work is mainly to capture the up-to-date development of image engineering in China, to provide a convenient means of literature searching facility for readers working in related areas, and to supply a useful reference for the editors of journals and potential authors of papers. Considering the wide distribution of related publications in China, 577 image engineering research and technique references are selected carefully from 2341 research papers published in a set of 15 Chinese journals. These 15 journals are considered as important journals in which papers concerning image engineering have higher quality and are relatively concentrated. Those selected references are classified first into 5 categories (image processing, image analysis, image understanding, technique application and survey), and then into 21 specialized classes according to their main contents. Some analysis and discussions about the statistics made on the classification results are also presented. This work shows a general and off-the-shelf picture of the various progresses of image engineering in China. In 2003, the number of research papers in image engineering had a considerable increase. Except "traditional" fields of image segmentation and image coding, new emerging research topics, such as digital image watermarking, human face and organ detection, image matching and information fusion, and image and video retrieval are keeping "hot". It should be pointed out particularly that the ratio of the number of research papers in image engineering over the number of research papers published in the above 15 journals attends a new stage in 2003. This has shown the tendency of fast progresses of image engineering in China.