On Saturday 03 January 2004 03:11, Edward C. Jones wrote:
IM
I have uploaded a new version of my small image processing system IM to "http://members.tripod.com/~edcjones/IM-01.01.04.tar.gz". Most of the code in IM (pronounced "I'm") is inferior to "nd_image" so I will eventually convert it all to "nd_image".
I had a look and I guess that indeed you could use the nd_image package for some low level stuff (I am the author of nd_image). nd_image is however also still being developed and I am looking for directions to further work on. I wondered if there is anything you would like to see in there?
THOUGHTS
There are many open source image processing systems but most of them get only to the Canny edge operator and then stop. A sample of the better ones are:
ImageMagick http://www.imagemagick.org/ OpenCV http://www.intel.com/research/mrl/research/opencv/ Xite http://www.ifi.uio.no/forskning/grupper/dsb/Software/Xite/ VXL http://vxl.sourceforge.net/ Gandalf http://sourceforge.net/projects/gandalf-library/ imgSeek http://imgseek.sourceforge.net/
I think not all of these are general image processing systems and often a bit limited. One problem that I have with most of these packages is that they stop at processing 8bit or 16bit two-dimensional images. That is a limit for quite a lot of image analysis research, for instance medical imaging. That is why numarray is so great, it supports multi-dimensional arrays of arbritrary type. nd_image is designed to support multiple dimensions and any data type. That is not always easy and may prevent some optimizations, but I think it is an important feature. That idea is of course not new, matlab is starting to support multi-dimensional image routines and I am aware of at least one C library that does this, although it is not free software: http://www.ph.tn.tudelft.nl/DIPlib/
And then there is the huge and hard to use "Image Understanding Environment" (IUE) at "http://www.aai.com/AAI/IUE/IUE.html". Has anyone used this?
The website appears to updated last in 1999, which is not encouraging. Looks hideously complex too.
A good starting point is "The Computer Vision Homepage" at "http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~cil/vision.html". At this site there is a list of published software. A well-known example is the Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi Feature Tracker coded by Stan Birchfield at "http://vision.stanford.edu/~birch/klt/". Thanks. Note how short the software list is compared with the size of the computer vision lterature.
Why does so little software exists for the more advanced parts of computer vision? I feel this is mostly because academic researchers seldom publish their software. In some cases (for example, face recognition software) there are financial motives. In most cases. I suspect that there is no pressure on the researchers from journals or department chairmen to publish the software. So they avoid the work of making their software presentable by not releasing it. The result are many unreproduced experiments and slow transitions of new algorithms out of academia.
This is certainly true. I know from experience that often you simply cannot afford to design and maintain a software package after you came up with something new and published it. So a lot of things never leave the laboratory simply because it is hard to do properly. I hope that having a system around like numarray with packages will help.
A good computer vision system Has an easy to use and widely used scripting language. Python Has powerful array processing capabilities. numarray, nd_image Wraps a variety of other computer vision systems. The wrapping process should be straightforward. SWIG, Pyrex, Psyco, ..., and the Python API. Provides a uniform interface to its components. Is used by many people.
I intend to develop nd_image further as a basic component for multidimensional image analysis. It would be great if it would get picked up to be part of a system like to propose. Maybe in the future SciPy could play that role. What I would like to hear from people that use this type of software is what kind of basic operations you would like to see become part of nd_image. That will help me to further develop the package. Contributed code is obviously also welcome. Peter -- Dr. Peter J. Verveer Cell Biology and Cell Biophysics Programme European Molecular Biology Laboratory Meyerhofstrasse 1 D-69117 Heidelberg Germany Tel. : +49 6221 387245 Fax : +49 6221 387306