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.