Research Research Tools for Image Analysis and Processing

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Research Tools for Image Analysis and Processing
Dr. Eugene Ageenko, Dr. Alexey Podlasov

As a standard, research work in the field of image processing and compression includes lots of experimentation. New ideas shall be first implemented in some programming languages or environment, and then undergo extensive empirical evaluation. Analysis of the weak sides will lead to a further research and development work. The implementation process (programming of the developed method) is usually the most time-consuming part of any research process. Therefore the flexibility of the implementation, such as code readability, fast modification feasibility, friendly programming environment, etc. do often prevail over the implementation efficiency, memory load and computation time. The efficient implementation could be often too expensive to conclude, especially in the research process, when frequent algorithm modifications are required. Still, the implementation efficiency should not be overlooked in the algorithm design process. The experiments should possible be conducted in a realistic time-frame and using reasonable hardware resources. The current work examines the usability of NIH ImageJ Java-based framework in the image processing research in the case of implementing morphological operations. We demonstrate how the environment can be easily understood, and the new operations implemented and modified by researchers familiar with the basics of Java language. The set of morphological operators is implemented as a test case and shows good usability in terms of ease programming and computation efficiency.

Resources

Internal:

     Working and development with ImageJ - Student Reference, starting point to program with ImageJ
     Java Tools for Morphological Image Analysis and Research  - Research Report, good example on topic
         (a shorter conference paper is available in Publications section)
     Implementing Mathematical Morphology Algorithms with Image J (IT Project, detailed version)
         Implementation of mathematical morphology algorithms with ImageJ (Web-page, brief version)
         Mathematical Morphology Plug-ins for ImageJ (ZIP-file)

External:

• Digital Image Processing with NIH Image (Mac) / Scion Image (PC) / ImageJ
• NIH ImageJ package
• Image J Application Programmer Interface

Literature:

     Nick Efford. Digital Image Processing: A Practical Introduction Using Java (With CD-ROM), Addison-Wesley (2000)

• This book provides a thorough introduction to current state-of-the-art IP technology while using the Java programming language to implement the described algorithms. The material on the accompanying CD-ROM includes Java classes that can be used by the readers to build their own IP software, as well as a set of tools that will let them experiment with IP concepts. My personal recommendation.