CODEWITHSUNDEEP
objective-cmacoscocoaimage-processing
trican
trican

Reputation: 1195

Getting started with image processing on Mac OS X

I recently moved from a PC to a MacBook Pro. I'm starting to go through tutorials on Objective-C and developing in Cocoa. I do a lot of image processing algorithm development work (pixel by pixel manipulation) in my day job so I'd like to get create a test image processing app or two for OS X. I'm struggling to figure out where to start - let's say I want to create a simple application (that I could reuse) like the following:

  1. load an image from an open file option within a file menu
  2. display this within the GUI.
  3. Click a button to apply pixel by pixel processing
  4. Update the displayed image
  5. Save the processed image from the save option within the file menu

Any pointers or links would be most appreciated.

Thanks

Other info:

  1. I'm pretty familiar with OpenCV within Linux - haven't looked at using it within Objective-C/Cocoa/Xcode environment yet though - not even sure if this would be a good idea?

  2. I guess it would be nice to use GPU acceleration as well, but I'm not familiar with OpenGL/OpenCL - so I might have to put that one on the long finger for the moment.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2433

Answers (2)

Brad Larson
Brad Larson

Reputation: 170319

As samfisher suggests, OpenCV is not that hard to get working on the Mac, and Core Image is a great Cocoa framework for doing GPU-accelerated image processing. I'm working on porting my GPUImage framework from iOS to the Mac, and it's entirely geared around making accelerated image processing easy to work with, but unfortunately that isn't working right now.

If you're just getting started on the Mac, one tool that I can point out which you might overlook is Quartz Composer. You have to download the separate Graphics Tools package from Apple's developer site to install Quartz Composer, because it's no longer shipped with Xcode.

Quartz Composer is a graphical development tool that lets you drag and drop modules, connect inputs and outputs, and do rapid development of some fairly interesting things. One task it's great for is doing rapid prototyping of image processing, either using Core Image or OpenGL shaders. I've even heard of people using OpenCV with this using custom patches. You can easily connect an image or camera source into a filter chain, then edit the filters and see live updates as you work on them, without requiring a compile-run cycle.

If you want some sample QC projects to play with, I have a couple of them linked from this article I wrote a couple of years ago. They both do the same color-based object tracking, with one using Core Image and the other OpenGL shaders. You can dig into that and play around to see how that works, without having to get too far into writing any code.

Upvotes: 1

Saurabh Passolia
Saurabh Passolia

Reputation: 8109

As you are looking at the Apple platform, you should look into the CoreImage framework - it will provide you most of pre-baked cookies ready to be consumed in your application.

For more advanced purposes, you can start off with openCV.

Best of luck!!

Upvotes: 5

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