ALE is an image processing program, which takes multiple source images and combines them to remove noise etc (a process I believe is known as "stacking"). It should also be possible to use it to stitch together individual photographs into a larger panoramic view. It has a truckload of options and I'm sure there are many other things it can be coerced into doing, as it appears to be pretty powerful.
I ported it this morning and uploaded it earlier today for wider testing, as at the time I couldn't get it to work - it appeared to stop at random places, but I thought this might be me being impatient as the images I was using for testing were rather large. I have continued to try and get it working and have now managed to do so.
A sequence of five images, the first of which looks like this:
Were cleaned up to produce this: (the poor focus is entirely my fault)
So here follows a few hints:
1. Raise the task priorityIssue the command
changetaskpri 1 before calling ale-bin. This was my problem. You will notice it hogs the CPU but it does work. At priority 0 it obviously doesn't get anywhere near the amount of CPU time it needs.
2. Use the following script to convert a directory full of JPEGs into a directory full of PPMs (this port of ALE is compiled only with support for PPMs)
list >t:convjpegs.tmp #?.jpg lformat="jpegtopnm %n >%n.ppm"
execute t:convjpegs.tmp
delete t:convjpegs.tmp
The above will need NetPBM installed to work.
3. If the source file is a video, you can split it into PPMs with MPlayer and this command:
mplayer -nosound -vo pnm:outdir=/t/ video.mov
That should output the frames to T: (note the crappy UNIX naming, it won't work with proper AmigaOS paths as colons confuse MPlayer)
Please post in this thread if you have any tips or have discovered something interesting which ALE can do. If you've tried creating a panoramic view please post the result.
Edited by Chris on 2009/11/30 18:41:27