xmorph & gtkmorph
The two programs xmorph
and gtkmorph
are the GUI (graphical user interfaces, that is, front-ends) to libmorph, a library that implements
digital image warping , known
as morphing.
This is a brief review
- Hosting
The project for all of the above programs is hosted in SourceForge, and is
called
xmorph.
- Source code
The source code is distributed
in the web page of releases, as one single tar file called
xmorph_yyyymmdd.tar.gz.
- License
All the programs and codes are open
source: they are subject to the GNU General Public License
- Windows binary
A binary of gtkmorph for Microsoft Windows platforms is available for
download in the same page; the newest version (since July 2004) come in
a
.exe automatic installer (thanks to A.Profeti) , and it
needs GTK libraries for Windows, to be downloaded and
installed separately: read the INSTALL.htm
file.
- Linux binary.
Binary packages for Debian GNU/Linux
are currently available
in Debian: just type "apt-get
install xmorph" or "apt-get
install gtkmorph".
Binary packages of xmorph are
available in most distributions, such as SUSE
and Mandrake,
but unfortunately they are outdated, and gtkmorph is not available (which is
a real pity).
- NEWS
The (low traffic) mailing list xmorph-herald
features news on xmorph et al.: announcement of new
releases, description of features, usage tips, users q/a ...
- TODO
In the future, there are plans for a version of gtkmorph
that will do
3D morphing.
- HELP
Unfortunately the current code has lost the GIMP plugin:
help is needed.
morphing
From the README, by M.J.Gourlay:
Morphing was invented and first used
by Industrial Light and Magic. The original author of the first
morphing algorithm is Douglas B. Smythe. If you can get ahold of
the article, read Douglas B. Smythe's article A Two-Pass Mesh Warping Algorithm
for Object Transformation and Image Interpolation'', ILM Technical Memo
1030, Computer Graphics Department, Lucasfilm Ltd., 1990.
This kind of morphing is technically nothing more than a simultaneous
warp and dissolve (see example) of an image.
Another kind of morphing, which is far
more involved than what xmorph does, uses 3D models of the two things
being morphed.
The first commercial use of morphing was in a sequence in the
movie Willow.
Since then, morphing has been widely used. Among the more
memorable morphing sequences are those found in Michael Jackson's
``Black or White'' video, and in the movie T2.
Be sure to read George Wolberg's Digital Image Warping. I have corresponded with George
Wolberg about this program. I asked him whether he considered
xmorph to be a violation of copyright of the algorithms in his book,
since there are similarities. Mr. Wolberg assured me that my
algorithms were different enough that there was no problem, and he
seemed very interested and enthused about the existence of my public
domain implementation. Also, the algorithms published in Mr.
Wolberg's book had bugs in them which I and other xmorph contributors
have found, and those bugs have been reported to George Wolberg, who
verified my corrections to be proper. I was also told that these
bugs were propagated on to Lucasfilm, although I have heard from no one
at Lucasfilm directly.
libmorph
A.Mennucci: In Nov 2003, I have reviewed some of the libmorph
code; I have changed the morphing routines , to this end:
- in the older code, meshes must have the border on the image
border; now the border of the mesh is free to move
- the old warp algorithm works on the original image, and
pushes the
pixels from the original image to the warped one; the new code works on
the warped image, and pulls the pixel from the original one;
- for this reason, I have rewritten the resample
algorithm: there are
two routines now,
- bilinear sampling:
reasonably good, 5 times faster than the antialiasing
- antialiasing sampling:
very high quality (dynamic lanczos kernel); recommended for animations,
for images with fine grain and texture, for the final results of your
work; even for still images, it produces sharper images than the above
(in all of my tests)
for more info, read the slides
(from HBES 04), or see this example image
gtkmorph
gtkmorph: Written and Copyright (C) 2000-2004 by A C G Mennucci
This GUI uses the GTK libraries. It is more advanced than xmorph, since
- it can morph multiple images at a time
- it can add and remove lines to the control mesh
- points in the mesh can be labelled as being part of features
(think: nose, mouth, hand...); then the features can be
- moved as a single object
- distorted (but this needs some work)
whereas the non-labelled points are automatically smoothed by the
program, using an energy derived from thin
plate spline theory: this way, meshes can have many many points
- points can be adjusted to a subpixel precision, using a magnifier lens
- it can make movies in GIF, MPEG2 and MPEG4/DIVX format
(by using external programs such as imagemagick and mencoder)
- it can read many different image formats
- it can select a subpart of interest of the loaded images (think:
calibration)
- it can choose between 'bilinear' and
'antialiased' morphing
- it can enhance the morphs using a wavelet-based algorithm
- it has a wizard, called guide,
to help first time users
You may also read the slides (from HBES 04) where the above
improvements w.r.t. standard morphing are discussed.
gtkmorph has been succesfully
used in real world application, for
research in Neurophysiology; it may be used in general for research in
Geometric Morphometrics. Some selected publications:
xmorph
xmorph/morph/libmorph: Written and Copyright (C) 1994-2000 by Michael
J. Gourlay
The original xmorph web pages (by M.J. Gourlay) are not hosted at
Colorado research
any more; a copy can be found
here;
but all links referring to other subjects are broken.
The original web pages contain examples and tutorials for xmorph.
This web page is Copyright (c)
Mennucc,
(email d3@tonelli.sns.it)
Oct 2003 - 2007; Hosting by
