[lug] Looking for image manipulation software FYI: what I'm working on

Paul E Condon pecondon at mesanetworks.net
Wed Nov 24 22:34:33 MST 2004


Thanks for your input. 

Ed was closest to my prejudices about my project. Yes, it's like
medical image processing.  Michael gave a lot of useful information
about gimp. Unfortunately, mostly why I shouldn't try to use
it. Imagemagick has an interface to C++ object model. That's very
interesting for what I'm trying to do. The hope of automation is
important to my project, and I don't see gimp as a path to automating
what needs to be automated.

FYI, I'm investigating ways to make the record of voting more Open,
capital O intended.  I imagine that it would be socially useful to
have the entire record of scanned ballots available for examination at
a openly accessable web site. But I am looking for ways to extract the
marks made by the voter from the printing on the ballot, in order to
reduce data download requirements. (Recognize the ballot and subtract
the fixed data from the image.) First cut results are that idea is not
technically crazy, maybe crazy politically, but not technically.
Latest results, sugject to revision, are that bzip2 compression gives
approx. 300x compression of a tiff image of a ballot. If this holds up
maybe image subtraction will not be meeded to achieve realistic
performance. 

By my estimates, the whole record of scanned ballot images for Boulder
County should be less than 100 GB. This is not a lot of data by the
standards of today. Google would hardly notice the extra load. 

Boulder County, today. Tomorrow, the World!

-- 
Paul E Condon           
pecondon at mesanetworks.net



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