Because the textbook doesn't cover some very crucial topics, I have put together a reader of papers and tutorials to cover this material.

Almost all of these papers are available on-line. However, many people have said that they prefer to have a single "bound" set of papers, and the economics of printing actually make the photocopied readers cheaper than having everyone print the papers out themselves.

That said, what is required is that you read the papers. If you don't want to buy the reader (for example, if you don't mind reading the papers on-screen), that's fine by me.

The reader (or I should say the first reader, since there may be another one later in the course) consists of documents related to image-based graphics.

Gamma. Charles Poynton. Chapter 6 of A Technical Introduction to Digital Video, published by John Wiley and Sons.

This chapter is nice because it discusses the issues in human perception of brightness, and how we account for it in computer imagery. The book's focus is on video, so some of what he has to say may be a little off topic. In general, this is a very well written book that is an excellent introduction to many topics related to video.
Chapter 6 is available on-line from Charles Poynton's Web Site.

Basic Signal Processing. Pat Hanrahan, Lecture Notes for Stanford CS 248 (Introduction to Computer Graphics).

An excellent overview of the basics of signal processing that are needed for the first part of intro graphics. I have my own set of notes in the works, but Pat's are better. They also have the advantage of being tested on Students elsewhere.
These are Available on-line from the CS 248 Web Page.

Compositing Digital Images. T. Porter, T. Duff. Compositing Digital Images, Computer Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH), 18:3, pp. 253-259, 1984.

This is the paper that pretty much introduced the mathematics of compositing. Unfortunately, it is not available on-line.

Image Compositing Fundamentals. Alvy Ray Smith. Microsoft Technical Memo #4.

This paper is a nice review of the most important pieces of the math of compositing, which you will learn in a different paper (Porter and Duff). He also describes some tricks for making compositing go fast.
This is available on-line from Microsoft's web site. A companion paper describing some of the history of this stuff is interesting, but optional for the class. It is available here.

Blue Screen Matting. A.R. Smith and J. Blinn, Computer Graphics Proceedings SIGGRAPH '96, pp. 259-268.

This is a comprehensive, and mathematical treatment of the problem of determining the matte of an object given a picture of it. Unfortunately, the basic methods are protected by patents, so few people bothered to write about them. This paper provides some fancier methods that you may want to implement for your projects.
There is no on-line version that I can find (on the microsoft web page, you can find the abstract and the picutres).