Thursday, February 4, 2010

Digital Image Processing

I undertook a project on digital image processing (DIP) during May-June 2009 at Indian Space And Research Organization (ISRO). We learned a lot about the working of the great organization and also understood the concepts behind remote sensing and Geographical Information Systems (GIS). We also learnt the implementation of image processing algorithms and were planning to tweak them a little to align them with our project.

The Project:

I was to lead a team of 6 responsible for creating a project on the various techniques of image processing viz Classification, Enhancement & Filtering. We used Visual Studio 2008 as the IDE and created a MFC based project that provided a wide variety of DIP functions. We used the IGIS SDK to achieve our goal.

The next question that arises is :
Q) What is the IGIS SDK ?
A) Well it is a under construction project that is a join venture of ISRO and a company named Scanpoint Geomatics. So we were provided a dll that was exporting functions to do the processing in the background. Our task was massively reduced due to the high level of abstraction provided by the dll. But then again, since all this was under development (hence poorly documented) we had to write our own interface and handle events and a GUI (Graphical User Interface) which could make the image processing tasks easy.

Q) Is this IGIS SDK available as a free download and can anyone use it?
A) Well it is a proprietary software and has to be bought (obviously we were provided with keys for the development of project).

There are a lot of dimensions to the project.... its better that we read the complete documentation of the project. Well I was asked to present my project at both ISRO and my college. So here is the ppt I used.

As always, here are the sources to the project. But then again, you would require IGIS to be preinstalled for this to run.

On the whole, I can say that it was a great learning experience at ISRO. I am grateful to our project guide Mr. Vinod Bothale and would like to thank him for being there whenever needed.

Here for a quick preview of the project