cos426.jpg (39279 bytes)

Computer Graphics, Spring 2004


Assignment 1: Image Processing

Due on Monday, Feb 16 at 11:59 PM


Overview

In this assignment you will create a simple image processing program. The operations that you implement will be mostly filters which take an input image, process the image, and produce an output image.

Getting Started

You should use the following skeleton code (1.zip or 1.tar.gz ) as a starting point for your assignment. We provide you with several files, but you should mainly change image.cpp.

You can find test images at /u/cos426/images (on the OIT accounts, such as arizona.princeton.edu).

After you copy the provided files to your directory, the first thing to do is compile the program. If you are developing on a Windows machine, double click on image.dsw and select "build" from the build menu. If you are developing on a UNIX machine, type make. In either case, an executable called image (or image.exe ) will be created.


How the Program Works

The user interface for this assignment was kept to the simplest possible, so you can concentrate on the image processing issues. The program runs on the command line. It reads an image from the standard input, processes the image using the filters specified by the command line arguments, and writes the resulting image to the standard output. For example, to increase the brightness of the image in.bmp by 10%, and save the result in the image out.bmp, you would type:
% image -brightness 0.1 < in.bmp > out.bmp
For each available image filter there is a corresponding optional argument. To see the complete list of options, type:
% image -help
If you specify more than one option, the options are processed in the order that they are found. For example,
% image -contrast 0.8 -scale 0.5 0.5 < in.bmp > out.bmp
would first decrease the contrast of the input image by 20%, and then scale down the result by 50% in both x and y directions. Another way of doing the same thing would be
% image -contrast 0.8 | image -scale 0.5 0.5 < in.bmp > out.bmp
which uses pipes instead of multiple options per command line. The ability to use pipes can be used to avoid creating temporary files. For example,
% image -contrast 0.8 | image -scale 0.5 0.5 < in.bmp | xv -
does the same thing as the previous command, but it redirects the final output to be the input of xv, which simply shows you the result on the screen, without creating any temporary files in your directory. Another advantage of this kind of interface is that you can combine different filters in shell scripts, and automate image processing steps, which can save you time.

What You Have to Do

The assignment is worth 20 points. The following is a list of features that you may implement (listed roughly from easiest to hardest). The number in front of the feature corresponds to how many points the feature is worth. The features in bold face are required. The other ones are optional. Refer to this web page for more details on the implementation of each filter and example output images. For any feature that involves resampling (i.e., scale, rotate, "fun," and morph), you have to provide three sampling methods: point sampling, bilinear sampling, and Gaussian sampling.

By implementing all the required features, you get 12 points. There are many ways to get more points:

For images or movies that you submit, you also have to submit the sequence of commands used to created them, otherwise they will not be considered valid.

It is possible to get more than 20 points. However, after 20 points, each point is divided by 2, and after 22 points, each point is divided by 4. If your raw score is 19, your final score will be 19. If the raw score is 23, you'll get 21.25. For a raw score of 26, you'll get 22.


What to Submit

You should submit one archive (zip or tar file) containing: The writeup should be a HTML document called assignment1.html which may include other documents or pictures. It should be brief, describing what you have implemented, what works and what doesn't, how you created the composite image, how you created the art contest images, and instructions on how to run the fun filters you have implemented.

Make sure the source code compiles on the workstations in Friend 017. If it doesn't, you will have to attend to a grading session with a TA, and your grade will suffer.

Always remember the late policy and the collaboration policy.


Hints

A few hints:

FAQ

Stay tuned for more questions.