THE MAGAZINE FOR COMPUTER APPLICATIONS
Circuit Cellar Online offers articles illustrating creative solutions
and unique applications through complete projects, practical
tutorials, and useful design techniques.

IMAGE PROGRESSING FUNDAMENTALS

Part 1: Playing with the Pixels

by James Antonakos

Start ý Imaging 101 ý RLE Compressor Tool ý Adjusting the X-Y Resolution ý Adjusting the Z-Axis Resolution ý Simple Image Operations ý Run-Length Compression ý More to Come ý Sources and PDF

RLE IMAGE COMPRESSOR TOOL

The RLE image compressor tool is a Windows executable application written in Visual C++ 6.0. I use the RLE image compressor in a machine vision laboratory class taken by seniors in my department at Broome Community College. I wrote the tool to make use of image files captured and saved by an older frame grabber, which had limited software for processing the captured images. The frame grabber captures images with 256 ý 256 resolution using 6-bit pixel values, which provides 64 shades of intensity for each pixel.

Photo 1 shows the RLE image compressor interface. The source image being manipulated is displayed on the left side of the dialog box. Left-clicking one of the many control buttons causes a processed image to be displayed on the right side. To conserve space, only the processed image portion of the dialog box will be shown in the examples that follow.

Photo 1ýThe source image is displayed by left-clicking the Load button after entering a valid image file name. The average pixel intensity of the source image is displayed to the right of the Threshold button. (Look ahead to Photo 8 for a screen shot of the RLE image compressor tool at work.)

PREVIOUS • NEXT