Can anyone tell me if it is possible to import .jpg files into MS Mappoint Europe 2006 ?
If it is possible can this be done by an OCX control ?
I would like to import some aerial photography of an area into MapPoint to enhance the coverage of a small area,
Thanks for your time
Ian
Not in an easy and meaningful way.
I have heard of people importing their image tiles as pushpin images, and then plotting these across the map area. This should work but the tile sizes will be scale invariant. Ie. the image will be messed up as you zoom in or out.
A more complex method is to use MapPoint in an ActiveX control and intercept all zoom/pan messages. Then use these to determine the current view area and projection. Then using Win32 GDI+ calls you should be able to overlay an image over the area of the ActiveX control (use alpha to set transparency). That is theory - it would take quite a bit of experimentation to get it to work, and it is probably easier to use an alternative implementation (or even an open source viewer).
Related
I'm currently an MS student in Medical Physics and I have a great need to be able to overlay an isodose distribution from an RTDOSE file onto a CT image from a .dcm file set.
I've managed to extract the image and the dose pixel arrays myself using pydicom and dicom_numpy, but the two arrays are not the same size! So, if I overlay the two together, the dose will not be in the correct position based on what the Elekta Gamma Plan software exported it as.
I've played around with dicompyler and 3DSlicer and they obviously are able to do this even though the arrays are not the same size. However, I think I cannot export the numerical data when using these softwares.I can only scroll through and view it as an image. How can I overlay the RTDOSE to an CT image?
Thank you
for what you want it sounds like you should use Simple ITK (or equivalent - my experience is with sitk) to do the dicom handling, not pydicom.
Dicom has built in a complete system for 3D point and location specifications for all the pixel data in patient coordinates. This uses a bunch of attributes in the dicom files in the Image Plane Module set of tags. See here for a good overview.
The simple ITK library fully understands and uses the full 3D Image Plane tags to identify and locate any images in patient coordinates by default - irrespective of such things as the specific pixel spacing, slice thickness etc etc.
So - in your case - if you use SITK to open your studies, then you should be able to overlay them correctly "out of the box", because SITK will do all the work to parse the Image Plane Module tags and locate the data in patient coordinates - just like you get with 3DSlicer.
Pydicom, in contrast, doesn't itself try to use any of that information at all. It only gives you the raw pixel arrays (for images).
Note I use both pydicom and SITK. This isn't something bad about pydicom, but more a question of right tool for the job. In fact, for many (most?) things I use pydicom, but for any true 3D type work, SITK is the easier toolkit to use.
I am researching into the best way to detect test in a photo using open source libraries.
I think the standard way is as follows (note: steps 1 - 4 all use OpenCV):
1) detect outline of document
2) transform document so it's flat and cropped, using said outline
3) Make the background of document white, using a filter
4) Feed resulting image to Tesseract
Is this the optimum process, or is there a better way, or better tools?
Also, what happens for case if the photo doesn't have a document outline (It's possible that step 1 & 2 are redundant)?
Is there anyway to automatically detect document orientation (i.e. portrait / landscape)?
I think your process is fine. I've used a similar process for an Android project.
I think that the only way you can discover if a document is portrait/landscape is to reason with the length of the sides of the bounding box of your outline.
I don't think there's an automatic way to do this, maybe you can find the most external contour approximable with a 4 segment polyline (all doable in opencv). In order to get this you'll have to work with contour hierarchy and contous approximation (see cv2.approxPolyDP).
This is how I would go for automatic outline detection. As I said, the rest of your algorithm seems just fine to me.
PS. I'll leave my Android project GitHub link. I don't know if it can be useful to you, but here I specify the outline by dragging some handles, then transform the image and feed it to Tesseract, using Java and OpenCV. Yeah It's a very bad idea to do that in the main thread of an Android app and yeah, the app is not finished. I just wanted to experiment with OCR, so I didn't care much of performance and usability, since this was not intended to use, but just for studying.
Look up the uniform width transform.
What this does is detect edges which have more or less the same width with respect to their opposite edge. So things like drainpipes (which can be eliminated at a later pass) but also the majority of text. Whilst conceptually it's similar to a distance transform, the published method uses rather ad hoc normal projection methods and Canny edge detection.
If my designer gives me a 960x640px image of what the screen should look like, as well as all of the individual elements as images or text, is there a way to lay out the images and text on the iPhone/iPad screen without doing it manually through code? The way I'm doing it now is a series of trial and error, trying to guess the position of each element.
By the way, the types of layouts I'm trying to do are simple static layouts for stuff like Menus and High Scores lists, etc.
You should try one of the editing tools: LevelHelper, CocoShop and CocosBuilder. The problem will be the output format, make sure that not only the editing part works to your specification but that you can actually use just the snippet of code you need to plug it into your code.
Do you have an image-editing software like Photoshop or GIMP? How about opening the 960x640px image with any such software, then hovering your mouse over the center of each element for its coordinates, and then finally pumping these values into your code?
In my opinion, this is at least better and way faster than trial and error:)
If you want to measure position of graphic elements. You can try a commercial called xscope. The trail version can be downloaded form their official website. It is the best tool I ever seen to measure distance, color(like, it can copy color measured directly to [UIColor ...] format), etc. If you want something freeware, I would like to recommend markman, which is a Chinese software, it's built on adobe air. All elements/button are graphic, so you don't need to read chinese to use it..
You can try to use some open source editor and write your exporter. For example I am using blender as a level editor for the game I am working on. It has a nice python API that can be used to export all the information you need.
My whole experience with direct use of graphics consists of drawing shapes using Turbo Pascal’s gdi unit on a 386 machine ages ago, finding it unbearably slow and never giving it a second thought. In other words, I have next to no idea where to begin.
For a simple Internet radio player application, I would like to design a graphic display somewhat similar to Winamp (but a bit larger and easier on the eyes, since the illegibility of such displays is one reason I’m trying to do my own).
Simple graphic components like those imitating LED displays are nowhere near sufficient, of course. I don’t expect to be drawing clickable UI controls, and certainly not skins – just the readout, with text, digits and a few symbols. I understand Delphi 2010 supports Direct2D, but I only have D2009.
What are my options? Are there any 3rd party components that would help?
On edit two small points. I need the drawing to be flicker-free (i.e,, unlike what I experienced all those years ago in Turbo Pascal :-). Is TCanvas going to be fast enough for that? Also, I would probably want to use alphablending, which I don't think I can get with the basic TextOut, LineTo etc. graphics API. (I just don't know what's possible). What about GDI+?
A library for fast 2D graphics for Delphi is available as open source on Sourceforge:
Graphics32 (home page: http://www.graphics32.org/)
Graphics32 is a graphics library for
Delphi and Kylix/CLX. Optimized for
32-bit pixel formats, it provides fast
operations with pixels and graphic
primitives. In most cases Graphics32
considerably outperforms the standard
TBitmap/TCanvas methods.
Features Some of Graphics32 features include:
Fast per-pixel access up to 100 times faster compared to standard TBitmap;
High-performance Bitmap alpha blending (including per-pixel alpha blending);
Pixel, line and polygon antialiasing with sub-pixel accuracy (combined with alpha blending);
Arbitrary polygon transformations and custom fillings;
Bitmap resampling with high quality reconstruction filters (e.g. Lanczos, Cubic, Mitchell);
A unique state-of-the-art rasterization system;
Affine transformations of bitmaps: rotations, scaling, etc with sub-pixel accuracy;
Arbitrary projective transformations of bitmaps;
Arbitrary remapping transformations of bitmaps (e.g. for Warping, Morphing);
Flexible supersampling implementation for maximum sampling quality;
Flicker-free image displaying components with optimized double buffering via advanced MicroTiles based repaint optimizer;
Multiple customizible easy-to-use overlay layers;
Locking of bitmaps for safe multithreading;
A property editor for RGB and alpha channel loading;
Design-time loading of image formats supported by standard TPicture;
Works on Borland Delphi, C++ Builder and Kylix (The last version that supported Kylix was 1.8.3).
As of version 1.5.1b Graphics32 is licensed under the terms of the Mozilla Public License.
Take a look at TCanvas. It's built into most visual controls and contains easy methods for the sort of simple drawing you're looking at, without the need for mucking around with DirectX or OpenGL. If you want a really simple surface you can draw on, place a blank TImage TPaintBox on the form and use its Canvas as your drawing surface.
Mostly I agree with Mason and the comments. TPaintBox is a very simple component really. You implement the OnPaint event and are in complete control. It is fast enough on a fast-enough machine.
Put it on a TScrollBox and you don't even need to worry about where the user has scrolled to :)
Make sure you check out the DoubleBufferred property of the parent control(panel/ScrollBox).
If it is a complex drawing/graphic also check out InvalidateRect - this controls which area of a canvas is redrawn.
Of course like all graphics/drawing it gets pretty complicated pretty quickly :(
Just saw your edit. If you need alpha blending and flicker-free drawing, TCanvas is probably not going to be good enough for you. You should look at components that wrap OpenGL or Direct3D and provide you a high-power graphics canvas.
One such package is Asphyre, though I'm not sure if they have a version that works on Delphi 2009+ yet. I've also got a custom-built library that wraps SDL 1.3 and gives you a drawing frame component you can place on a Delphi form. It does work on Delphi 2009 and later, but I haven't released it as its own package yet. You could find it if you dig around in the SVN archive of my game engine, but if you can wait a day or two I could try to get it made into an easily-usable BPL component package and available for download.
Is there a good image watermark control for Delphi? It would be nice if it could receive both text and images to insert in a base photo.
I would also prefer it was free.
I couldn't find any pre-packaged controls. But watermarking is not very hard at all. All you simply need to do is draw an image on top of another image with the use of alpha blending. This site has a whole section on alpha blending in Delphi. They provide links to graphics libraries which have implemented it.
However if you're using Delphi.NET, and can access the relevant classes in the framework, there is an easier way using only framework methods.
Take a look at Graphics32 together with GraphicEX.
Or see if PascalMagick does the trick.