Dirty Pictures

A very fundamental work on understanding and analyzing images under a strict
statistical framework, specifically an interpretation of standard image
processing problems under Markov field theory and Bayesian solutions:

On the Statistical Analysis of Dirty Pictures
by Julian Besag
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series B (Methodological), Vol. 48,
No. 3 (1986), pp. 259-302

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2345426.pdf