Developing Image Processing Tools in X Window System

The X Window System is an industry-standard software system which facilitates programmers to develop portable graphical user interfaces. This thesis describes an image processing tool developed under the X Window System. A multiwindow image display software with image editing and improvement functions is developed. The software has four modules: environment generation, image creation, image editing and image improvement. The environment generation module creates working windows, scrollbars, dialogbox and pulldown menu buttons, and tracks mouse cursor positions. The working windows are three adjacent windows allowing display of three different images simultaneously. The dialogbox provides an interface between the user and the program, such as input new image and parameters. The pulldown menus offer various selections of image processing functions. A pair of scrollbars are also added to allow users to move the magnified image up, down, left and right so that the full picture can be viewed. The image creation module can build colormap, load image data file, convert pixel values to screen color values, create image, and display image on the screen of a workstation. The program can read either sun.rasterfile format or a plain data file. If a plain data file is detected, the software can transform it to sun.rasterfile by adding an appropriate header and a colormap. There are two kinds file saving features: screen capture and store. The screen capture allows the user to save that part of image displayed on the screen. The store function saves the entire image which may be either the screen size or bigger size image (e.g. merged or zoomed image). The image editing module is equipped with the functions for zooming (in or out), merging, rotating and restoring images. The merge function constructs a new image based on the user selected or input image from the dialogbox. The rotation center of an image can be any point selected by user\u27s clicking mouse button, and the rotation angle is supplied by user in the dialogbox. The image improvement module consists of some image point transformation and image enhancement functions. This software package is easier to use than existing tools for image processing. It has been used in the image processing projects and related educational purposes. The software provides a framework and can be easily extended to other potential applications