phill%MED-IMAGE.COMPSCI.BRISTOL.AC.UK@cunyvm.cuny.edu (03/09/89)
This is to introduce a toolkit of image processing programs, collectively called the ALV toolkit for historical reasons, written by Phill Everson <everson@uk.ac.bris.cs> in the Computer Science Dept. of Bristol University, United Kingdom. The toolkit is designed to aid image processing work on Sun workstations. It is intended to be easy to use, though not restrictive to experienced users, user-configurable, extensible and flexible. For example the toolkit will work on both black and white and colour workstations and in either case will transparently, to the user, display an image to the best of its ability on the screen. The toolkit has recently been rewritten to use the standard Sun rasterfile format to store its images allowing multiple depth images to be processed by the same toolkit and easy migration of data between packages. *** All people currently on the alv-users mailing list will receive a copy of the new toolkit in the next couple of days. The toolkit is made up of a number of tools. These include programs to display an image on the screen, to display a histogram, to perform histogram equalisation, to threshold, to print an image on an Apple Laserwriter, to invert an image and to convolve an image with a user-supplied linear filter. Currently, there are 27 such programs. The toolkit was initially written to fulfill a need at Bristol University for a single coherent set of tools to support basic image processing research on a variety of projects. We had found that each user or group of users was writing their own copy of programs to do similar things, like displaying an image on the screen, and more importantly, in an enviroment were disk space is always at a premium, was each keeping separate copies of these often large programs. Using a coherent set of tools with a consistent file format has substantially increased cross-project communication and in addition has provided a higher starting point on the learning curve for novice Sun-Users/Imagers. We have found that users generally use the core tools as a basis and are then able to concentrate their work in their own area of interest. The ALV toolkit comes complete with a 40-50 page manual online which can easily be dumped to a laserwriter to provide and impressive reference for a Public Domain Program. The toolkit is currently distributed via email. Contact <alv-users-request@uk.ac.bris.cs> to request a copy. The following are the commands currently in the toolkit: array2ras - convert array to raster blend - blend two rasters together box - box a raster convert - convert textual raster to raster convolve - convolve a raster with a linear filter dither - convert 8 bit raster to 1 bit using dither matrix dsp - display a raster on screen equalise - equalise a raster ffill - flood fill a raster halftone - convert an 8 bit raster to 1 bit using bitmap font hist - display histogram of raster im2ras - convert old ALV format to raster invert - invert the pixels in a raster ras2array - convert raster to array ras2im - convert raster to old ALV format ras2lw - output a raster on a Laserwriter rasinfo - print raster udimensions and depth rasrange - range a raster's greylevels rasregion - clip a raster to a region rasscale - scale a raster's size by a scaling-factor rasthresh - threshold raster rasval - print pixel values of raster scr2ras - interactive screendump to raster transform - shear or rotate a raster winlev - convert N bit deep raster to 8 bits deep winlev8 - interactively change window and level of a displayed raster Phill Everson SNAIL: Phill Everson, Dept Comp Sci, University of Bristol, England JANET: everson@uk.ac.bris.cs UUCP: ...mcvax!ukc!csisles!everson ARPANET: everson@cs.bris.ac.uk OR everson%uk.ac.bris.cs@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk BITNET: everson%uk.ac.bris.cs@ukacrl.bitnet