Check out the post from John Nack or take a look at the screenshot directly. I am interested in what they offer. Actually if it is only the basic Flash filters being used this will not be anything new. Picnik and Fauxto are doing this already. We will see when they release it.
Tag Archive for 'imageprocessing'
Mario Klingemann did an awesome job on the seam carving demo I posted this weekend. He removed a lot of dirty stuff from the code and optimized it very well. You can get a full explanation on his blog.
As Mario mentions we are looking also in a technique that allows us to expand images. At the end the code is still not organized at all. A lot of performance can be gained with appropriate memory management. We keep you posted.
By the way there are still one or two tickets left for our rent an idea workshop! Last chance to have André, Mario and me for one day introducing you into this kind of stuff.
There is currently a lot of hype around this paper by Dr. Ariel Shamir and Dr. Shai Avidan. Honestly — it really kicks ass. This is a realy nice idea and I can absolutely understand Adobe just hired one of them direclty. Now there is a online demo of this available. Unfortunately it misses some source-code to look into and possibly optimize it.
So I did my own version. Basically this is a slim-version of the original technique. Image is converted to grayscale and a convolution matrix is used to find the pixel’s energy levels. Then the seams are created as the paper describes it … sort of :-). At the end the seam with the lowest energy is picked and removed.
The code is very ugly, not documented at all and not optimized. But it is also saturday night and I should be out drinking a beer already. You can press a key in the online demo to change the scale direction or click to reset it. If you can improve something do not be shy and post it.
- View the demo (careful, this will be CPU intensive)
- Juggle with the source-code
- Picture from flickr
Update: Here is another demo that shows the effect even better.
Update 2: Make sure to follow the joint venture from Mario and me.
Remember I promised to release some paper on performance optimizations for the Flash Player? Well currently there is just to much to do in order to get it done. But I do not want to hide this from you any longer.
Analyzing big BitmapData objects is a pain. For a nice contrast correction, world luminance or any other histogram based filter you need to know about all the pixels (if you want to make it accurate).
On my way from Germany to France a month ago I was thinking about this problem and I found something that is strangely enough faster to read a whole picture — but only for big pictures. For smaller ones fortunately it does not matter that much since the time you have to spend on reading them is around 30ms.
So basically I read through a BitmapData like this:
[code]var x: int;
var y: int;
for (;x < width; ++x)
for (y = 0; y < height; ++y)
color = bmp.getPixel( x, y );[/code]
I guess it is very common to do that. Now this goes row by row (or column by column) through your BitmapData. Now just for fun I was testing what happens if you cycle through your BitmapData without ever resetting x and y. And voilá it is faster. On a 2048x2048 BitmapData it is 336ms vs 739ms. That is a nice performance increase. But funny enough it is slower for smaller bitmaps.
Here are the results (cycling vs. for-loop):
| Iterations | Cycle[ms] | Simple for[ms] |
| 128×128 | 2.7 | 2.7 |
| 128×128 | 11.1 | 10.3 |
| 512×512 | 29.7 | 28.3 |
| 1024×1024 | 95.4 | 106.3 |
| 2048×2048 | 355.8 | 738.6 |
And here is the code for the faster version:
[code]var y: int;
var x: int;
var m: Boolean = true;
while (true)
{
color = bitmapData.getPixel(m ? x++ : –x, y);
if (x == width || x == 0)
{
if (y++ == height)
break;
m = !m;
}
}[/code]
With the release of popforge there was another announcement as well. The Google Code page says that a future project is the ImageProcessing library.
Probably the current version — wich I am not happy with actually — will go there and a better version will come soon supporting asynchronus filter execution for instance. I will not give any date for now but expect a release in the next couple of weeks.
A different approach for a spectrum visualizer. This one is based on a lorenz attractor and I really like how fast everything is calculated and gives a feeling of speed. This time I also had to decrease the amount of particles I render. Instead of 64k (which was still running smooth) I decided to use just 8k because it looks better.
What I like about it is that it looks complex but is very simple to do. Based on the spectrum I just change the parameters of the lorenz attractor and that is it. A little bit of paletteMap, BlurFilter, Matrix and ColorMatrix of course as well but it is only about a 100 lines of code.
Three days ago there was some news about an online version of Adobe Photoshop. Today I read on a German news site that they will probably use Flex. I am so excited about that news and I am looking forward to try their product. Of course I have a special interest in this because I developed my own library and now the big boys do it.
It will also be very interesting to see what they will do about some issues. If you want to edit a picture (like 6megapixel picture) it will be a big fight against stuff like the maximum execution time. Probably they will use an approach to filter an image over more than one frame. So it would be possible - just like Photoshop does - to see a progress of that thing. But even in that case such a filter would take you at least half a minute of waiting to complete. Maybe they will start working on some performance issues of the Flash player as well..?!
Anyways I can’t wait to see this in action!
Update: I am quiet sure that we will see two techniques here. One will definitly be connected to Event.ENTER_FRAME for extensive x,y-loops and a lot of getPixel()/setPixel() calls. The second method is also connected to Event.ENTER_FRAME and goes rectangle by rectangle for stuff like paletteMap(). Just speculations. We will see more in six months.
I added two the Imageprocessing Library some new blurs. RadialBlur, ZoomBlur and GeometricDisplacedBlur. The GeometricDisplacedBlur is very nice, because you can use any GeometricMap with this filter.
I also added a RedEyeRemoval and made some updates to the Color class. Some other filters have been updated as well. I will focus now on some examples and more GeometricMap objects. I am also thinking about filters for HSV color correction and this stuff. But that is not very hard since it is only the ColorMatrix that has to be extended. I am also trying to find good ways for texture synthesis (that will not freeze Flash for 10 seconds).
If someone has any idea for filters that are missing just post it here please.
I had a lot of stuff on my mind the last days (besides the Wiimote). Check the documentation for nice pre-views. Here are the resuts:
de.popforge.imageprocessing.filters.*
- Closing
- Dilation
- Erosion
- Opening
- Outline
- TopHat
- Curves
- Blobs
- CellGenerator
- Corona
- FractalPlasma
- MakeTileable
- Mandelbrot
- OldschoolPlasma
- Tile
- AverageCut
- MedianCut
de.popforge.imageprocessing.geom.*
- Curve
- StructuringFunction
I think that I would sell this if I were an artist. Unfortunately I am not. What you see here is a fractal plasma with applied Curves filter. The UI in this example is of course not tweaked. But you can add and remove points from the curve. Also there are some other options like changing the interpolation etc.
It is also nice that I have no lags in the stand-alone player even if I use live mode.
