Morphological image processing

I wrote this code in 2001 for my thesis on image processing, and from that I got an article published:

Breadth-First Search and Its Application to Image Processing Problems, published on IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, VOL. 10, NO. 8, August 2001. link

I have made no functionality change since then, nor have I tried to update to a more modern version of GTK+.

Tested on a Raspberry Pi running stretch, May 2022.

Installing

You need libtiff to be installed. In a Debian-derived system:

apt-get install libtiff libtiff-dev

If you want to run the GTK+ UI, you will need libgtk-dev too. This was developed way back when, on GTK+ version 2.

sudo apt-get install libgtk2.0-dev

Then:

make

Will build the two executables: pro-image and pro-gtk-image. You can skip building the GTK+ bit, by doing:

make pro-image

Using

The two executables take in a single TIFF image as input, and after starting, become a command-line interpreter.

For example, we start processing the image manos/a30000.tif. In the terminal:

./pro-gtk-image manos/a30000.tif

Now, we can use the terminal as a REPL. One or more commands may be issued, followed by a newline. After each, a GTK+ window will display the result of the command.

E.g.

threshold 100

→ a window opens showing the image after thresholding

regions

→ a window opens showing the image after cleaning the noisy regions

The commands may also be chained. For example:

threshold 100 regions

… a window will open after each command.

Non-graphical executable

The non-graphical executable does not produce a window with the results, of course. We should write out to a TIFF file to show progress.

% ./pro-image manos/a30000.tif
% threshold 100
% regions
% boundary
% skeleton
% write skel.tif