This is the eighth 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

545 image engineering research and technique references are selected carefully from 2426 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 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 2002

the number of research papers in image engineering has a considerable increase. Except "traditional" image segmentation and image coding

new research areas

such as image formation techniques

digital image watermarking

human face and organ detection

image matching and information fusion

and image and video retrieval are still in fast progresses.