VIMAGE 0.9 Oct 29, 1991 -- Lee Iverson This package can now be considered to be a full beta release of the vimage application and widget set. It is a collection of Xt widgets which create a cohesive image viewing tool. The user-interface is still somewhat flexible but probably won't change much from now until the 1.0 release. It works fine with X11R5 and should continue to work with R4. Why another one? The answers are of two types. 1) I wanted a widget that could be easily used either standalone or embedded in a larger application. An earlier poll of comp.windows.x searching for such a beast turned up nil. 2) I needed something that would allow arbitrary user-defined extensibility to new image types and display variations. This meant the adoption of an objected-oriented image type heirarchy (a la Xt). Eventually such things as EdgeMap and ImageFlow can be implemented and seamlessly integrated into the overall application. INSTALLATION: Should be straightforward. Configuration information is in Imakefile and config.h. Edit those files appropriate to your system and you should be fine. Pay special attention to compiler selection and VIMLIBDIR and VIMINCDIR at the top of the Imakefile. Once this is done, then xmkmf make depend make World make install If you don't have xmkmf and imake, you will have to deal with the raw Makefile provided. Oh well... RECOMMENDED TOOLS: - JPEG: The free JPEG distribution is an excellent intro to JPEG file compression. The latest release is available from uunet.uu.net:graphics/jpeg/jpegsrc.v1.tar.Z. - libXukc: This is a widget set which extends the functionality of the Athena widgets considerably. They are available as part of the Dirt interface builder system (export.lcs.mit.edu:contrib/dirt.A1.10.tar.Z). Currently, the three components of this system I depend on are included with this package. - ad2c. This is an extremely useful way of providing a consistent set of fallback application defaults. It essentially compiles the .ad file for an application into a set of strings which should be loaded into the application context at startup. Actually, ad2c is only required if you change VImage.ad and want the new defaults compiled in as fallback resources. - ezMenu. This is a nice, simple Menu interface which gives a clean and simple interface to the Athena SimpleMenu structure. I've modified it slightly, but only to make it a little more robust. - dld-3.2.3. Dynamic loading facilities. This is an excellent package for dynamically loading code into a running applications. I use it to deal with user-defined (and identified) file types. Available from aeneas.mit.edu:/pub/gnu/dld-3.2.3.tar.Z - Xpm-3.0. Facility for handling Xpm files etc. This is an X pixmap external data format analogous to the XBM format. Available from export.lcs.mit.edu:/contrib/xpm-3.0.tar.Z FEATURES: - ImageViewport widget. A viewport widget which manages and with arbitrary resizing of the child widget. It is clearly derived from the Xaw Viewport widget, and includes both it's copyright and my own. Supports a popup menu bar and a large number of actions for display and manipulation of the image. - Image widget. A general purpose image viewing, zooming, and examining base. This is the part of the system which is the most volatile at the moment, since I have plans to extend this to an ImageStack widget (mostly done) (i.e. a number of images overlayed on on another!). A set of interaction primitives enable arbitrary image zooming. - FileDialog widget. A Mac-like modal File dialog widget. Needs some work, but is quite functional and has a nice interface for only selectively seeing certain files. Depends on the regexp(3) library functions (included). - CMManage. A set of routines for managing a consistent colormap within an application in which there are a potentially broad variety of different areas of the program which are trying to allocate colors. This overrides the standard Xt StringToColor translations, so that resource manager color definitions will work properly even when this color manager is being used. - notifier. A simple application which takes input from its stdin and pops up an AsciiText widget to display them. A utility function (provided) will pipe stderr fromm your X application to the notifier! - An Xt-like class heirarchy of Image types. The analog for Core is the GenericImage type. Three standard Image types are currently provided: BitImage, ByteImage and RGBImage, all rectangular bitmaps. ByteImage has a colormap associated with it. The image reading functions (currently supporting only PBM, PGM, PPM and GIF) create one of these types. The Image widget interfaces to a set of generic object-oriented calls which are redefined (as necessary for the image types). - A dynamic loading interface for image formats and associated support functions. One of the really essential things for supporting an experimental image-processing environment is the ability to define special image types (e.g. EdgeMap or OpticalFlow) and allow the user to use them in as transparent a manner as possible. This depends on dld-3.2.3 (and the patches below). - Adoption of a generic image format that supports cross-platform portable images with arbitrary data formats (also using dynamic loading). I'm not sure whether something out there already will work (maybe CGM), but if nothing really fits what I need, then (sigh!) another image format. - Automatically uncompresses, unbtoa's and translates from any PBMPLUS recognized format to something that it can read! This is a Wow! BUGS: - Currently the relationship between Image files and ImageDisplays is not as well put-together as it should be. As a result, the attempt to reread a file from the StackEditor causes a core dump. CAVEATS: - There is currently NO DOCUMENTATION (except this file). A little bit of application default browsing and source code reading should elucidiate things for now, but real docs will come along soon. - I've only really tested this on a Sun4 OS 4.1 with mono and 8bit color displays and on VAX/Ultrix, but my ability to get close to other hardware is limited, so no guarantees. Sigh! - If you are using the MIT X11R4 Xt library (patchlevel 15+), there is a bug in XtDestroyWidget that bites pretty big. The R5 work has forced an end to official patches for R4, so you will need to apply the following patch in lib/Xt. *** Destroy.c.~1~ Mon May 6 12:25:26 1991 --- Destroy.c Mon May 6 12:26:45 1991 *************** *** 225,233 **** while (i < app->destroy_count) { if (dr->dispatch_level >= dispatch_level) { Widget w = dr->widget; ! if (--app->destroy_count) bcopy( (char*)(dr+1), (char*)dr, ! app->destroy_count*sizeof(DestroyRec) ); XtPhase2Destroy(w); } --- 225,234 ---- while (i < app->destroy_count) { if (dr->dispatch_level >= dispatch_level) { Widget w = dr->widget; ! /* This was writing well past the end of the list! -- leei */ ! if (--app->destroy_count > i) bcopy( (char*)(dr+1), (char*)dr, ! (app->destroy_count - i)*sizeof(DestroyRec) ); XtPhase2Destroy(w); } - If you are using dld-3.2.3, there are two bugs which I've tickled that should be fixed. They've been reported and will be in the next release. Patches follow: *** dld.c.~1~ Thu May 30 03:13:31 1991 --- dld.c Wed Jul 10 04:02:39 1991 *************** *** 2015,2021 **** if (_dld_latest_entry->library_flag && _dld_latest_entry->subfiles == 0) { free (_dld_latest_entry->local_sym_name); if (_dld_latest_entry->filename != _dld_latest_entry->local_sym_name) ! free (_dld_latest_entry->filename); _dld_latest_entry = kill_entry (_dld_latest_entry); file_close (); --- 2015,2024 ---- if (_dld_latest_entry->library_flag && _dld_latest_entry->subfiles == 0) { free (_dld_latest_entry->local_sym_name); if (_dld_latest_entry->filename != _dld_latest_entry->local_sym_name) ! free (_dld_latest_entry->filename); ! ! _dld_latest_entry->local_sym_name = 0; ! _dld_latest_entry->filename = 0; _dld_latest_entry = kill_entry (_dld_latest_entry); file_close (); *** dld.c.~1~ Wed Jul 10 04:02:39 1991 --- dld.c Sun Aug 25 12:13:18 1991 *************** *** 290,296 **** int size; { register int result = malloc (size); ! if (!result) fatal (DLD_ENOMEMORY); return result; } /* _dld_malloc */ --- 290,296 ---- int size; { register int result = malloc (size); ! if (size && !result) fatal (DLD_ENOMEMORY); return result; } /* _dld_malloc */ Planned Extensions: - Documentation. Some. Any... - A shared memory image manager (probably a separate program) for fast and efficient communication between image processing programs and the viewer. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Lee Iverson McGill Research Centre for Intelligent Machines leei@mcrcim.mcgill.edu Computer Vision and Robotics Lab McGill University, Montreal