Saturday, April 30, 2011

Accepted for the Google Summer of Code!

Our proposal was accepted for the Google Summer of Code 2011.
Now it is time to tool up and cover some groundwork before we begin!

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Edges

Edge detection has always played some part in my illumination invariant algorithms, so I thought it would be a good idea to try getting it into the Scikit. The CellProfiler project has released their algorithms, so I've ported it together with its well written tests. It is rudimentary but a good foundation for a start.

Interestingly the Sobel functions of opencv and ndimage gives different results, perhaps a good idea to look a bit into the source to see what differs.
My branch is hosted at the following location:
Pull request and commit for this patch:

Friday, April 8, 2011

GSOC2011

This is my proposal to improve scikits.image for the Google Summer of Code 2011.

Multiple computational backend support

While scikits.image is currently built on NumPy, leveraging the graphical processing unit (GPU) by using PyOpenCL (http://mathema.tician.de/software/pyopencl) would provide a significant speed increase for certain parallelizable algorithms.

Similarly, other libraries such as CorePy (http://www.corepy.org) and Theano (http://deeplearning.net/software/theano) provide benefits over NumPy under certain circumstances.

To leverage these libraries, a backend system will be implemented whereby algorithms can easily be run on different libraries or devices. For example, we could execute a color conversion on the GPU as:


from scikits.image import backend

rgb2hsv(x, backend=backend('opencl'))


Video Input and Output

The scikit has excellent input/output plugin facilities, but currently does not support video reading, writing or display. Existing open source video reader libraries will be wrapped using Cython (http://cython.org), whereafter the existing ImageCollection class can be modified to display them. The possibility of wrapping a camera acquisition library can be investigated.


Image Processing Algorithms

The number of algorithms provided by the library is currently limited. The addition of certain key algorithms would increase its usefulness dramatically. I propose adding the following algorithms, implemented in Cython:

  • Feature detection (probabilistic Hough transform, STAR, FAST)

  • Segmentation (graph cuts and watershed)

  • Geometrical transformations (distortion removal)

This goal seems ambitious, but for many algorithms existing wrappers exist which may be re-used, for example code from CellProfiler at MIT’s Broad Institute (released under a BSD license).


Documentation

To improve adoption of the project, I’d like to write an introductory tutorial and improve the existing documentation.