[kepler-dev] Kepler Imaging

[Dan Higgins]

Hi All,

    I just took a look at the Powerpoint file 
"presentationKeplerImaging.ppt" (by Nandita Mangal of SDSC) which can 
found in $KEPLER/docs/presentations/. It shows some nice imaging 
processing actors that I was unaware that anyone was creating! 

    What came to mind on seeing this presentation is that there are a 
number of similar imaging processing operatons that can be done with the 
IJMacro actor and that I have never really documented these capabilities 
in a way that other Kepler developers would appreciate or even know about.

    IJMacro is an extension of the the ImageJ actor. ImageJ is a 
Java-based image processing system from the NIH 
(http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/). I originally created the ImageJ actor 
just for displaying large map images created by GARP/ENM workflows. 
Using it for displaying images in Kepler was convenient because it opens 
many different types of images and automatically scales the display to 
convenient sizes. The user can then interactively carry out a variety of 
other image processing operations and then save the result. I also added 
a plugin for displaying georeferenced ASCII grid files, since this 
wasn't supported by the native ImageJ code. But in addition to handling 
all sorts of image operations, and supporting plugins, ImageJ also has a 
builtin macro language and a macro recorder. The IJMacro actor executes 
ImageJ macros. So a user can record some image processing macro with 
ImageJ, paste that macro into the macroString parameter of the IJMacro 
actor, and then have a Kepler actor that carries out some fairly complex 
image processing actions.

    Even though I was aware of this macro capability, I haven't really 
created many good examples. (I primarily used it to display ASCII grid 
files.) But I invite other developers who may be interested in 
operations ranging from image scaling and rotation to spatial FFTs and 
filters to consider the possible use of the IJMacro actor. If anyone is 
interested, feel free to contact me for further information.

Dan Higggins
NCEAS