Blurdom

Mucked about with a blur tool tonight, a couple of interesting things.

I'm not sure yet if I want to embed the various tools into a panel or into a window, so at the moment the tools all run in their own panel. This actually turned out quite tidy because I was able to create a very simple 'standard requester' for popping up the tools which adds an ok/cancel button, and handles the various window events, and then just tells the tool if it's been cancelled or to apply it via a simple interface. It's pretty ugly to look at for now but that isn't important.

Then I got into creating a working blur tool. Because it's a bit slow and I want it to apply to the live image I wanted to run it in a thread. One problem I couldn't quite work out is how to handle finishing off (i.e. cancel) if the thread is busy without blocking the GUI thread. Once it's cancelled it has to return it's resources - the tool layer at least - before another tool can activate. And it can't do that if it's still using it ...

For now I decided to leave it running synchronous but to have it execute on multiple threads - this box is a 6 core dual threaded machine so there's a lot of unused cpu going on. Pretty easy actually, just ask the system how many threads there are, then break the image up into bands and let each one run amok on it's own band. Use of a few judiciously placed calls to a CyclicBarrier and it's all hunky dory. After all the stuff with trying to maximise concurrency in OpenCL this is a piece of piss.

That sped it up somewhat, but it still needs to run unhinged from the GUI thread so it doesn't bog things down on the large blur radii. I haven't fixed the edges yet either so it's not really that useful for anything as it stands.

I should probably just snarf the ImageJ blur code, which is quite fast and has a few tricks for scaling such as interpolating down and running a smaller blur kernel after a certain point.

Then I tried it along with the selection tool - the blur applies properly only to the selected area, but obviously I haven't got the compositor working properly yet since it isn't showing areas outside of the selection mask during a 'replace target' mode. I guess that'll need another visit, damn it - I thought i'd worked all that out. Also i'm just blurring the whole image and then applying the mask, but it could presumably just process the selection bounds.

It's more these fiddly details i'm trying to bed down rather than the tools themselves at this point but I had the code there already so I thought i'd add another menu item.

Late last night I was playing with it on my laptop to see how the performance and memory use was (not that the laptop is completely gutless). At one point I noticed it was starting to have trouble keeping up with the mouse by the time you had 16 layers. Oh well big deal, it wasn't that bad. Then I remembered i'd run the JVM in interpreter mode to see how the memory usage faired ... so given that it wasn't so bad really.

Finally had a bit of warmth in the sun today. Been hanging out for that. Sat outside for a while cooking and eating a steak on the bbq with a bottle of beer getting some sunlight. I think it was still fairly cold 'outside' but its a sheltered spot so was quite pleasant.