In this section we’ll start with the “hello world” app and show you how you can load an image, perform some basic processing on the image, draw some stuff on your image and then display your results.

Loading images into Java is usually a horrible experience. Using Java ImageIO, one can use the read() method to create a BufferedImage object. Unfortunately the BufferedImage object hides the fact that it is (and in fact all digital raster images are) simply arrays of pixel values. A defining philosophy of OpenIMAJ is to keep things simple which in turn means in OpenIMAJ images are as close as one can get to being just arrays of pixel values.

To read and write images in OpenIMAJ we use the ImageUtilities class. In the App.java class file remove the sample code within the main method and add the following line:

MBFImage image = ImageUtilities.readMBF(new File("file.jpg"));

For this tutorial, read the image from the following URL:

MBFImage image = ImageUtilities.readMBF(new URL("http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8705593/sinaface.jpg"));

The ImageUtilities class provides the ability to read MBFImages and FImages. An FImage is a greyscale image which represents each pixel as a value between 0 and 1. An MBFImage is a multi-band version of the FImage; under the hood it actually contains a number FImage objects held in a list each representing a band of the image. What these bands represent is given by the image’s public colourSpace field, which we can print as follows:

System.out.println(image.colourSpace);

If we run the code, we’ll see that the image is an RGB image with three FImages representing the red, blue and green components of the image in that order.

You can display any OpenIMAJ image object using the DisplayUtilities class. In this example we display the image we have loaded then we display the red channel of the image alone:

DisplayUtilities.display(image);
DisplayUtilities.display(image.getBand(0), "Red Channel");

In an image-processing library, images are no good unless you can do something to them. The most basic thing you can do to an image is fiddle with its pixels. In OpenIMAJ, as an image is just an array of floats, we make this is quite easy. Let’s go through our colour image and set all its blue and green pixels to black:

MBFImage clone = image.clone();
for (int y=0; y<image.getHeight(); y++) {
    for(int x=0; x<image.getWidth(); x++) {
        clone.getBand(1).pixels[y][x] = 0;
        clone.getBand(2).pixels[y][x] = 0;
    }
}
DisplayUtilities.display(clone);

Note that the first thing we do here is to clone the image to preserve the original image for the remainder of the tutorial. The pixels in an FImage are held in a 2D float array. The rows of the image are held in the first array that, in turn, holds each of the column values for that row: [y][x]. By displaying this image we should see an image where two channels are black and one channel is not. This results in an image that looks rather red.

Though it is helpful to sometimes get access to individual image pixels, OpenIMAJ provides a lot of methods to make things easier. For example, we could have done the above like this instead:

clone.getBand(1).fill(0f);
clone.getBand(2).fill(0f);

More complex image operations are wrapped up by OpenIMAJ processor interfaces: ImageProcessors, KernelProcessors, PixelProcessors and GridProcessors. The distinction between these is how their algorithm works internally. The overarching similarity is that an image goes in and a processed image (or data) comes out. For example, a basic operation in image processing is edge detection. A popular edge detection algorithm is the Canny edge detector. We can call the Canny edge detector like so:

image.processInplace(new CannyEdgeDetector());

When applied to a colour image, each pixel of each band is replaced with the edge response at that point (for simplicity you can think of this as the difference between that pixel and its neighbouring pixels). If a particular edge is only strong in one band or another then that colour will be strong, resulting in the psychedelic colours you should see if you display the image:

DisplayUtilities.display(image);

Finally, we can also draw on our image in OpenIMAJ. On every Image object there is a set of drawing functions that can be called to draw points, lines, shapes and text on images. Let’s draw some speech bubbles on our image:

image.drawShapeFilled(new Ellipse(700f, 450f, 20f, 10f, 0f), RGBColour.WHITE);
image.drawShapeFilled(new Ellipse(650f, 425f, 25f, 12f, 0f), RGBColour.WHITE);
image.drawShapeFilled(new Ellipse(600f, 380f, 30f, 15f, 0f), RGBColour.WHITE);
image.drawShapeFilled(new Ellipse(500f, 300f, 100f, 70f, 0f), RGBColour.WHITE);
image.drawText("OpenIMAJ is", 425, 300, HersheyFont.ASTROLOGY, 20, RGBColour.BLACK);
image.drawText("Awesome", 425, 330, HersheyFont.ASTROLOGY, 20, RGBColour.BLACK);
DisplayUtilities.display(image);

Here we construct a series of ellipses (defined by their centre [x, y], axes [major, minor] and rotation) and draw them as white filled shapes. Finally, we draw some text on the image and display it.