

The Incredible Convenience of Mathematica Image Processing - tlrobinson
http://blog.wolfram.com/2008/12/01/the-incredible-convenience-of-mathematica-image-processing/

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jrockway
"The Incredible Convenience of Advertising on Social News Sites".

That aside, this isn't really a killer app. It is much easier to adjust an
image in the Gimp or Photoshop than it is to do so in Mathematica. If you are
doing image processing, it might be nice to have that available in
Mathematica, but it is equally easy to transform images in your
$FAVORITE_PROGRAMMING_LANGUAGE.

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LogicHoleFlaw
Don't think "image processing", think "signals processing." The ability to
perform complex interactive transforms on datasets representable as images is
actually pretty neat.

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henning
I doubt Mathematica lets you do anything that competing products like Matlab's
image processing toolkit don't do, it just greatly enhances the level of
activity associated with image processing.

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KevinMS
I remembered that baboon image from my Amiga!

[http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/amiga-
history-4-comm...](http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/amiga-
history-4-commodore-years.ars/3)

~~~
tlrobinson
Personally I prefer Lenna as a test image:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna>

;)

~~~
huhtenberg
<http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/lennapg/lenna_visit.html>

;)

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huhtenberg
Writing a flexible toolkit is the easiest part. Applying it to do something
actually useful that where the challenge is.

E.g.

    
    
      OK, but you could just do that in Photoshop, right? 
      Oh shush, let’s do something you definitely can’t. 
    

And so they create a widget that splits an image into 40 pieces, sorts and
groups them by similarity whereby the size of the group is controlled
interactively with a slider control. Undoubtedly cool, but ultimately useless
for 99.9999% of image processing professionals.

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scott_s
Luckily it was posted to a community of hackers, not a community of image
processing professionals.

~~~
huhtenberg
And why are they measuring themselves against Photoshop then ?

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scott_s
Because it is the premiere environment for manipulating images. But I think he
used pictures because that allows us to have an intuition for the kinds of
analysis that he's doing, not because he's setting Mathematica up as
competition to Photoshop.

As someone else pointed out, these sort of techniques could be useful for the
kinds of matrix manipulations and image analysis that scientists and engineers
do. Personally, I'm impressed that Mathematica appears to handle images the
same as matrices. That's powerful, and of interest to hackers.

~~~
huhtenberg
> _Because it is the premiere environment for manipulating images._

.. which is already "incredibly convenient" for those who are using it.

The example in the article is a typical straw man argument. Photoshop cannot
do something, not because it's weak on a technology side. It doesn't do it
simply because Photoshop users aren't interested in it as they do a different
kind of image processing.

> * "Allowing us to have an intuition .." *

You lost me there, buddy. I spent few years working in the image processing
field and let me tell you that the clustering of image fragments by similarity
is something that would interest a fraction of a percentage of a _researchers_
in the field. And if his example allowed you to understand what kinds of
analysis he is doing, I humbly take my hat off, that's really impressive.

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rflrob
I can't help but think of ImageJ here. Except Mathematica is much more of a
scripting language than Java, so much more convenient if you don't yet know if
you're doing the right thing.

~~~
albertcardona
For ImageJ packed with scripting languages, see Fiji: <http://pacific.mpi-
cbg.de> . Provides Javascript, Jython, JRuby, Beanshell, and Clojure, although
the latter is not a scripting language despite behaving like one.

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bockris
It sort of reminds me of VIPS which I used 6 or 7 years ago.
<http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk/index.php?title=VIPS>

But in the end using Python with the PIL module served my needs better.

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cool-RR
I think that if the power of Mathematica image processing would be combined
with the usability of Photoshop, it would be totally awesome. Maybe a plug-in
to use Mathematica from Photoshop?

