[SIP-devel] SIP 0.3.0 released

[Ricardo F. <rf...@if...>]

The SIP development team is happy to announce the new version 0.3.0 of
SIP, the Scilab Image Processing toolbox.  SIP reads/writes images in
formats like JPEG, PNG, and BMP. It does filtering, edge detection,
morphology, and shape analysis.

Home page:
http://siptoolbox.sourceforge.net

Download (works if the homepage gets too slow):
http://sf.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=68055&package_id=66476&release_id=216018

SIP 0.3.0 sourcecode is portable to most Unix-like systems.
No windows binaries are available yet (***volunteers are needed***)

What's New
==========

There are major enhancements in this release, as summarized bellow:

   o NEW bwlabel function to label connected components in a binary image.
   o NEW watershed function, for image segmentation. It accepts
     markers.  There is a nice example in the help page, showing how
     to separate overlying objects in a binary image.
   o NEW bwdist function with very fast euclidean distance transform
     algorithms: Olivier Cuisenaire's algorithm (CVIU 1999) and Calvin Maurer's
     algorithm (PAMI 2003). Probably the fastest exact methods anywhere.
     There is also a nice example in the help page for "bwdist".
   o NEW imroi function to define ROI's (Regions of Interest) using
     the mouse. Rectangle and ellipse selections are supported.
   o NEW imnoise function, to generate a few types of noise, such as
     gaussian white noise, salt & pepper, and more.
   o NEW thin function (Zhang-Suen thinning)
   o sipdemo is now called by "exec(SIPDEMO)"
   + INCOMPATIBLE: Double-precision Images are now normalized like M4t1ab:

          TYPE OF IMAGE           SIZE          VALUE RANGE
              Grayscale images     2D               0-1
              Truecolor images     3D (RGB)         0-1
        Paletted images, index     2D               1-NC (Number of Colors)
     Paletted images, colormap    NCx3              0-1

     This has many advantages. For instance, imwrite and imshow doesn't require
     normalization to obscure values such as 255 or 65535.
   o NEW GUI demo, mainly for interferometry images
   o NEW mogrify demo
   o mogrify now supports color images, and has a robust error treatment.
     All operations such as rotation, zoom, and color segmentation
     are now working for these images. There is a nice example in the help page.
   o INCOMPATIBLE: mogrify's drawing commands and many other
     functionalities are now working. An INCOMPATIBLE improvement
     has been made so more complex operations are now possible.
     For example, to rotate an image:
     BEFORE:   mogrify(image, '-rotate 60');      // WRONG
     NOW   :   mogrify(image, ['-rotate', '60']); // CORRECT
     The advantage is that you can now do this:
     mogrify(image, ['+antialias'; '-draw'; 'ellipse 50,50 30,30 0,360']);
     For one argument without parameter, nothing has changed:
     mogrify(image, '-equalize');  // histogram equalization
   o INCOMPATIBLE: drawline function has been changed & fixed.
     It was previously broken.  Thx to Marconi for reporting.
   o INCOMPATIBLE: improfile changed
   o INCOMPATIBLE: fftshift was renamed to sip_fftshift, because
     Scilab CVS now provides an fftshift.
   o NEW mkfftfilter function to provide frequency-domain filter kernels.
   o NEW ind2rgb function to convert indexed images to direct RGB
     hypermatrix storage.
   o NEW gray_imread funciton, to read every image as grayscale
   o NEW perim function, to compute the perimeter of a shape
   o NEW imvariance - image local variance
   o NEW pifilter - denoises an image without affecting abrupt variations.
   o NEW imphase - phase calculation (useful for interferometry)
   o NEW unwrapp - phase unwrapping by path following, used in
     interferometry/photonics
   o NEW poledetection function to detect residues in wrapped phased
     images.
   o NEW SIP manual by Jocelyn Druel:
      http://genie-optique.chez.tiscali.fr/SIP
   o FIXED memleaks in various C functions (thx. to Linder). Corrected
     functions are: imread, bwlabel, thin, skel, bwdist, drawline, mogrify
   o FIXED bug in minmax
   o imshow is faster for truecolor images, because it now uses less colors.
   o im2gray is now much faster
   o Error messages are now more descriptive in imread, imwrite, imfinfo
     and mogrify.
   o Many other bugfixes and minor improvements
   o Depends on: Animal 0.10.2 (required), ImageMagick 5.5.7 (recommended),
     and Gandalf library 1.3.2 (recommended).


Binaries for Linux are available for use with Scilab 2.7.  These
binaries are are self-contained, meaning that there is no need to
download ImageMagick or any other package.  Users only have to run
the loader.sce script from Scilab.

SIP is primarily developed by Ricardo Fabbri <ricardofabbri (at) users.sf.net>
and Jocelyn Druel <jdruel (at) users.sf.net>. It is endorsed by Dr. Odemir M. Bruno
<bruno (at) icmc.usp.br> and Dr. Luciano da F. Costa <luciano (at) if.sc.usp.br>.

We hope you enjoy SIP 0.3.0!

SIP Development team
--
Home page:
http://siptoolbox.sourceforge.net
Download:
http://sf.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=68055&package_id=66476&release_id=216108
Scilab:
http://www.scilab.org