Re: software for generating image files from gridded arrays of data?
On 4/18/07, Paul E Condon <pecondon@mesanetworks.net> wrote:
I need a simple way to turn an array of data values into
a picture. I think I once did this with imagemagick but
when I looked at the documentation yesterday almost none
of the documentation was familiar, as if there has been
a major redirection of the project. Can I use the
imagemagick that is in Etch? How? Or is there a different
package that can start with data
_that_is_not_already_in_a_recognized_image_format?
The IDL language was designed for this -- from the start it
supported more data types than many other matrix languages.
The free implementation is gdl (gnudatalanguage), but I'm
not sure about packages (I build it from the CVS repo).
IDL originated a week's worth of hard riding N. of matlab around the same
date. It is heavly used in niche areas of astronomy, remote sensing,
and medical imaging where image processing has been done for many years.
It is a very idiosyncratic language, but also very robust and economical of
resources (since it dates from the days when the biggest systems around had
10G disks and 128k RAM).
I remember that imagemagick had a way of treating a
binary file as raw image, and allowed one to tell it
the image size with command options, but I couldn't
find it documented in the current version. Is my
memory simply faulty? Was it some other software?
gdl uses the ImageMagick library to write data to image formats.
I generate the data from several existing sources of
gridded geographic data, e.g. USGS, NASA, USDOE. But
I want, for each data set, a picture and a matching
collection of numeric data, free of image formatting.
--
George N. White III <aa056@chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia
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