wilkins@jarthur.claremont.edu (Mark Wilkins) (01/23/90)
After a harrowing experience this last summer at Stanford doing image
processing work on a VAX and hacking up display software on a Mac, the
thought occurred to me that there might be a place for a serious scientific
image processing development platform on the Mac.
My personal wish list for such a system includes:
-- Support for multiband image data with at least 16 bands
-- Support for 8,16,32 bit integer image data and single, double,
extended MC68881-format floating point data
-- Support for display hardware ranging from 1-bit to 32-bit color
-- Built-in display and color-mapping capabilites for false color and
other such things
-- Provision for user-written routines for the following:
* Image importation from disk and other I/O devices
* Image export capabilities at the same level
* Custom color mapping routines
* Custom image manipulation both in the form of convolution
kernels and full-image operations such as Fourier transforms.
My question is this: What do those of you who do image processing in a
scientific environment want in terms of built-in functions for such a
system, both in terms of numerical processing and user interface?
Specifically, what sorts of transformations (Fourier, Hartley...) and fitting
routines (Gaussian fitting, polynomial least-squares, etc) would you like to
see as low-level tools for this sort of thing?
Also, what sorts of color mapping tools are useful? What is the best way
to implement a user-controllable color map so that a logarithmic scale, for
example, could be best implemented?
Finally, would an interface to permit external processing routines running
on other computers be useful? If so, what language would you prefer, and on
what machines? What language is best for the Mac?
In short, what would make the ideal image processing development package
on the Mac?
Please respond via E-mail... I will summarize for the net.
-- Mark Wilkins
wilkins@jarthur.claremont.edu