Imagetool: a GUI for TV image restoration


The project

This project was proposed by Tony Chan in Summer 1995 to provide a graphical point&click front-end to the Total Variation restoration routines that had been developed in his image processing research group at UCLA. The main contributors to this project are

We expect to release version 1 of this package in the near future.


Design Goals

The main goal of this project is to have an easy-to-use framework to test and compare several algorithms for TV image restoration (denoising and deblurring) and different choices of parameters. The methods we currently include are:

  • Primal-dual Newton's method.
  • Primal Newton's method.
  • Lagged diffusivity fixed point method.
  • Time marching method.
Another important design objective is the ability to add new methods to the interface.


Development framework

The development platform is matlab's graphical user interface routines for the front-end and C mex files for the computational kernels. See section installation for the software requirements and more details.


Usage

The imagetool has two main windows:

from which you do a number of things: load a degraded image, load a non-degraded image and degrade it afterwards, choose a method for the image restoration and its corresponding parameters, save the images, plot some statistics of the iterations, etc.


Installation

You can download the package for matlab 4.2c or the package for matlab 5.0. You need also the MEX files that are available for Linux, Sparc Solaris (SunOS 5.5), SunOS 4.1 or HP-UX 10. To install follow the instructions below:

  • gunzip -c imagetool_v*.tar.gz | tar xf -
  • gunzip -c imagetool_mex.tar.gz | tar xf -
  • cd imagetool
  • matlab
  • >> imagetool
If your computer platform is not Sun or HP, you need to compile the MEX files. The procedure would be as follows:
  1. download the C files,
  2. unpack them: gunzip -c TVMEX.tar.gz | tar xf -
  3. cd TVMEX
  4. follow the instructions of the file README.


In case the installation procedure fails, you might want to contact the maintainer.