[Numpy-discussion] Update for IM. a small image processing system

[Peter Verveer]

Hi Ed,
> A cople of things I would like to see:
>
> The ability to read and write a variety of image formats. 

That is of course important. But in my view really a separate issue from 
developing a library of analysis routines. The latter just have to operate on 
numarray arrays and need not to worry about how the data gets there. Of 
course you need to get your data in numarray. PIL seems to do a good job with 
images, except for 16bit tiffs which causes me quiet some problems. Anybody 
know a good solution for getting 16bit tiffs into numarray?

>ImageMagick
> has a good set. All of ImageMagick should be wrapped.

Isn't there already a python interface to ImageMagick?

> The Canny edge operator along with code for generating polygonal
> approximations to edges. See OpenCV.

Canny I will likely implement at some point. Polygonal approximations to edges 
can be done in many ways I guess. I would need to find some reasonable method 
in the literature to do that. Suggestions are welcome.

> Do you have some examples of algorithms for multi-dimensional images
> that you think should be put in nd_image?

At the moment I have only been looking at general basic image processing 
operations which normally generalize well to multiple dimensions. I will 
continue to do that. There are also somewhat higher level operations that I 
currently have not included. For instance, I implemented a sub-pixel shift 
estimator which I need for my work. That would be an example of a routine 
that is completely written in python using numarray and nd_image routines and 
does not need any C. This could be useful for others, but I am not sure if it 
belongs in a low-level library. Maybe we need some repository for that sort 
of python applications.

Cheers, Peter