JAI still current?

[lbrtchx]

~
I need to do some relatively serious work using graphics, mostly:
~
1) conversions from various image formats to plain bmp raster one
(for which you don't really need java, but based on my web users' base
I may have to somehow include the functionality in a comprehensive
program)
~
2) do some custom statistical pre-processing with the BMP data to do
such things as cleansing and aligning the data a bit, as well as
separating images and diagrams from text, previous to
~
3) convert the data to TIFF, in order to,
~
4) do some OCR, and finally
~
5) create a docbook xml document of the text or SVML graphic
~
The thing is that when I read the JAI version 1.1 documentation still
talks about java 1.1 and stuff like, which, as I read from the
excellent book by Jason Brittain and Ian Darwin; Tomcat: The
Definitive Guide:
~
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596101066/
~
is not even necessary anymore in current JVMs and the latest book
that was written specifically about the JAI
~
Building Imaging Applications with Java(TM) Technology
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0201700743/
# Paperback: 880 pages
# Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional (June 6, 2001)
~
even if it was written 2001, is being sold for some $130, which made
me wonder about the currency of all this
~
What is the most current info on java image processing you know of?
~
Do you know of any 3rd party libraries that could be helpful to me?
~
Any general suggestions about what I have in mind?
~
Thanks
lbrtchx
(comp.lang.java.programmer, comp.graphics)

 

[Tom Anderson]

I need to do some relatively serious work using graphics, mostly:
~
1) conversions from various image formats to plain bmp raster one
(for which you don't really need java, but based on my web users' base
I may have to somehow include the functionality in a comprehensive
program)
Easy.

2) do some custom statistical pre-processing with the BMP data to do
such things as cleansing and aligning the data a bit, as well as
separating images and diagrams from text, previous to
Doable.

3) convert the data to TIFF, in order to,
Easy.

4) do some OCR, and finally

If you're doing it yourself, hard, but if you're running an external
program, easy.

5) create a docbook xml document of the text or SVML graphic

One of those things which sounds easy but turns out to be hard to get 100%
right!

What is the most current info on java image processing you know of?

JAI is horrible. It's out of date because its developers died of shame
after releasing it.

java.awt.image contains some decent basic image-processing classes. You've
got images, colour models, image operators, convolution, etc. It isn't as
complete (or fast, i assume) as JAI, but it's much easier to use, and it's
part of the standard library.

javax.imageio is the modern standard package for image IO. However, the
basic implementation only reads JPEG, PNG, BMP and GIF images. You'll have
to find plugins to handle any others, sadly. Alternatives would be JAI's
image IO, or an ancient but still useful library called Jimi, both of
which have slightly larger ranges of supported formats. I don't know of a
java library with really wide support; i'd be tempted to use ImageMagick
(which is fairly portable C code) for that.

tom