AN INTEGRATED IMAGE PROCESSING AND GRAPHICS PROGRAMMING SYSTEM

Abstract

Image and graphic processing have become more and more important. However, the use of general purpose high-level languages such as C, Pascal and FORTRAN for picture processing are inconvenient because they rely on library functions and the design of special data structures to handle images and graphics. Existing special picture processing languages do not incorporate both graphics and image processing. Besides, most image processing languages lack in flexibility of programming at pixel level. Furthermore, these languages do not provide supporting environment and interactive interface. A picture processing language (PPL) and its supporting environment for graphics and image processing have been designed and implemented. PPL is based on C language with new types and constructs added to it for picture processing. For image processing, simple composition of images and powerful automatic iteration of image at pixel level with user specified statements are supported. Issues concerning memory management and low-level preprocessing of images are handled by the language. For graphics processing, a set of graphics drawing primitives is provided. Graphics editing operators and geometric transformations are available for hierarchical object modeling. The aim of the language is to ease programming effort in picture processing applications. PPL programming system consists of an interpreter and a compiler of the language. A syntax-directed editor and a source debugger is also available to make program development an interactive process. Helpfulness is the main design goal for the system. Most interpreters suffer from slow execution speed for loops due to repeated interpretation. This is especially severe in the case of image iteration because the image size is typically very large. Repeated parsing of the statements in image iteration is avoided by constructing a syntax tree for all the statements in it. The interpretation of the resulting syntax tree is very much faster than the parsing of these statements, and thus execution time can be reduced remarkably. Once a program is found to be satisfactory. a compiler is provided for the production runs to improve efficiency. The compiler generates C code to ease implementation and to enhance portability. However, the output code is well formatted so that it is readable.