Image Component Library (ICL): Other Classes

Overview

The ICLFilter package provides a large variety of image filtering classes. Here's is an incomplete list:

Generic and fixed size convolution (see icl::filter::ConvolutionOp)
Median operator (see icl::MedianOp)
Morphological operations (see icl::filter::MorphologicalOp)
Affine operation (see icl::filter::AffineOp)
General Gabor-filters (see icl::filter::GaborOp)
Image chamfering filters (see icl::filter::ChamferOp)
Threshold operations (see icl::filter::ThresholdOp)

Lookup-table filters (see icl::filter::LUTOp)
Arithmetical operations (see icl::filter::UnaryArithmeticalOp)
Logical operations (see icl::filter::UnaryLogicalOp)
Filters for combining image channels (see icl::filter::WeightChannelsOp)
Wiener filer (see icl::filter::WienerOp)
Local threshold operations (see icl::filter::LocalThresholdOp)
Image proximity measurement (see icl::filter::ProximityOp)

When talking about image filters some misapprehensions can arise. To prevent this, the following section will shortly introduce our understanding of image filters.

The icl-filter-array demo application can be used to examine filter chains

What are Image-Filters

In a most general view on image filters, a filter is a black box that has N image inputs and M image outputs. However this approach provides a very generic interface for image filters, this interface is not very feasible. Most common filters (e.g. binary image operations, linear filters or neighborhood operations) only need a single input and output image. Another larger group are filters with two input and on output images (e.g. arithmetical/logical per-pixel image operations or image comparison filters).
To avoid a large computational overhead arising of a too general interface, we support two dedicated filtering interfaces for the above mentioned 1-1 and 2-1 input-output combinations. To obviate further misunderstandings, we call this filter sets Unary Operations and Binary-Operations - or short UnaryOp and BinaryOp.
Each of this sets is represented by a equal named C++-class-interface, which is inherited by all implemented filters that have a corresponding input-output relation (from now on we use Ops(for operations).

For a better overview, the ICLFilter package is grouped into some modules: