[udig-devel] Image processing routines (and the BEAM software)

[Jody Garnett]

Jeroen Ticheler wrote:
> Hi all,
> I would like to have some feedback on the attempts so far from people 
> to add image processing functionality to uDig.
>
> I have seen some posts on integrating OSSIM for instance (!?).
>
> I was wondering if routines developed for the BEAM software (ESA 
> funded) could be integrated into uDig. The BEAM software is released 
> under GPL and seems powerful, fast and modular. Couldn't a 
> collaboration be established between the two projects to benefit of 
> the flexible architecture of uDig/Eclipse and of the uDig community 
> while using the powerful routines developed by BEAM? BEAM is all 
> developed in Java and the source code is available through the 
> installer. I do not see an active developer community for the project 
> though.
>
> A merger may result in a set of powerful, fully Java based image 
> processing routines.
>
> http://www.brockmann-consult.de/beam/
>
> Looking foward for some ideas and suggestions here,
Sure!

Jeroen, we have set up uDig to be toolkit agnostic. The catalog 
constructs of IService and IGeoResource are used to hold the definition 
of resources. Developers can provide mappings from those resources into
a data structures used by a give toolkit. So the same construct - a 
GeoTIFF could be represented as a GeoAPI GridCoverage interface with the 
implementation provided by GeoTools, or it could be represented as 
something from JOSSIM (the java bindings from the OSSIM project).

The next stage is the definition of a Renderer that knows how to ask for 
one of the data structures above and then draw it onto the screen.
If the BEAM toolkit is capable of accessing data and display then it 
would be easy enough to use for display.

If you were interested in just working with BEAM you could just use 
IService/IGeoResource and define operations that work against them
using straight up java code.

If you would like to work on this let me know and we can set up a 
directory in the community svn space

Jody