Sent: 2009-09-01 01:37:54 UTC (over 2 years ago)

From: Nicolas Robidoux

new GEGL samplers: what they are and where they are going

permalink

========
Abstract
========

Eric Daoust and Adam Turcotte are about to wrap up a pair of Google
Summer of Code 2009 projects having to do with new samplers. In this
document, I explain what the samplers do, how they (may) fit within
the GEGL library, and where (most likely) they are going.

I also indicate what will need to be done when non-affine
transformations (perspective, warp) are implemented in GEGL so that
they use the samplers tuned for downsampling with maximal benefit.

=============
QUICK SUMMARY
=============

(Warning: I wrote this document in a hurry: Hopefully, it contains no
significant inaccuracy.)

In total, twelve new samplers were programmed:

six samplers tuned for transformations in which good downsampling is
more important than good upsampling (for example, thumbnail
production):

downsize, downsharp, downsmooth and their simplified/faster versions
downsizefast, downsharpfast and downsmoothfast

and

six samplers tuned for transformations in which good upsampling is
more important than good downsampling (for example, image enlargement
and rotation):

upsize, upsharp, upsmooth and their simplified/faster versions
upsizefast, upsharpfast and upsmoothfast

(Note: Perspective transformations often are both upsampling and
downsampling.)

The naming convention which Adam, Eric and I used (which could be
changed) is as follows:

"up*" samplers are tuned for upsampling, "down*" samplers are tuned
for downsampling,

"*sharp*" samplers maximise sharpness at the expense of increased
aliasing ("jaggies"); *sharp* samplers behave more like nearest
neighbour than the other methods. "*smooth*" samplers minimise
jaggies at the expense of additional blur. "*size*" samplers are a
compromise between the two.

"*fast are simplified/faster versions. If "fast" is omitted, the
corresponding method is the higher quality/slower version.

As implemented for GEGL, none of the above methods are parameterised.

================
Relevant patches
================

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=588336 (remove the yafr sampler)
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=588180 (remove the sharp sampler, and add upsharp)
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=588193 (add upsharpfast, upsizefast and upsmoothfast)
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=592498 (add upsize)
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=592515 (add upsmooth)
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=588016 (add downsharp, downsize, downsmooth)
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=592349 (add downsharpfast, downsizefast and downsmoothfast)

(Non-sampler patches which Eric and Adam produced are not included
above.)

====================
Where this is going?
====================

(Feedback welcome and actually sought.)

If GEGL does not need "pretty good fast samplers," the "*fast" methods
could simply not be integrated into GEGL. If and when GEGL has
"quality levels," one could write a driver which selects the fast
method when the chosen quality level is low. In any case, programming
the "*fast" methods was not a waste: The s/nohalo family of methods is
multi-stage, hence the "cheaper" versions are used as stages for the
"non-fast" ones; in addition, the improved fast versions programmed
for GSoC will be ported to VIPS. This being said, it would be nice if
they could be merged into GEGL trunk and then removed, so that the git
repository have a record of them.

Keeping the "*fast" methods private (or not merging them at all) would
reduce the total number of "public" GEGL methods from twelve to
six. The following would further reduce the total number of methods to
four (or eight if "*fast" samplers are kept).

The downsize and downsharp samplers are very similar. For this
reason, it would make sense to only keep the downsize and downsmooth
samplers (same with downsizefast and downsmoothfast).

The upsize and upsharp samplers are very different from each other,
but research performed by Chantal Racette as part of her Laurentian
University Honours Thesis during the Summer suggests that the method
underlying upsharp should be used as a final stage for the
multi-stage methods upsize and upsmooth, yielding superior methods
which would replace the current upsize and upsmooth and make the
current upsharp obsolete.

So, in the end, there could only be four new additional GEGL samplers:

Two samplers tuned for downsampling: downsize and downsmooth (with
fast versions downsizefast and downsmoothfast if desired)

Two samplers tuned for upsampling: upsize and upsmooth (with fast
versions upsizefast and upsmoothfast)

Every one is a good general purpose sampler. The downsize method, in
particular, will be found to give acceptable results in "all"
situations (generally better than bilinear when upsampling, and much
much better than bilinear when downsampling). For this reason, I think
that downsize may be a good candidate for default GEGL sampler.

===================
DETAILED DISCUSSION
===================

===========
Terminology
===========

"Samplers" are methods like nearest neighbour, bilinear, bicubic,
lanczos, Catmull-Rom etc. This is what they do: Given a bitmap image
(which, at least in principle, specifies pixel values at pixel
locations only), samplers are used to obtain pixel values at
arbitrary locations, which is required when resizing, rotating,
applying perspective transformations etc.

Many key sampler properties are easier to explain in terms of the
"reconstructed surface," which is the surface obtained by "plotting"
the pixel values at all possible locations (not only the original
pixel locations).

An "interpolatory sampler" is one such that if a value is requested
at an original pixel location, the pixel value returned is the
original, unchanged pixel value. In other words, the reconstructed
surface goes through the original image data. Nearest neighbour,
bilinear, bicubic, lanczos and Catmull-Rom are interpolatory;
smoothing bicubic spline (the current GEGL bicubic default) is
not. Many non-interpolatory samplers are smoothing. In addition,
many exact-area samplers are non-interpolatory.

A co-monotone sampler has the following property: If the data (pixel
values) is non-increasing or non-decreasing (in some direction,
generally parallel to the axes), then the reconstructed surface has
the same property between the corresponding locations. A co-monotone
sampler does not introduce "haloing." Nearest neighbour, bilinear
and smoothing bicubic splines are co-monotone; Lanczos and
Catmull-Rom are not co-monotone (and they often introduce
significant haloing).

A strongly bounded sampler has the following property: The resampled
value is always between between the values at the four nearest input
pixel locations. If a sampler is monotone, then it is strongly
bounded; the converse is not true. A strongly bounded sampler can
only add haloing at sub-pixel scale, and the amount of haloing is
strongly limited. Nearest neighbour, bilinear and smoothing bicubic
splines are strongly bounded; Lanczos and Catmull-Rom are not.

A sampler is "exact on linears" if the reconstructed surface is a
plane (far enough from the boundary) whenever the input image's
pixel values all lie on a plane. Bilinear, smoothing bicubic splines
and Catmull-Rom are exact on linears. Nearest neighbour and lanczos
are not.

==================================
Description of the twelve samplers
==================================

See the source code for details and additional comments.

===============
Upsharp sampler
===============

"Upsharp" is an implementation of the symmetrized MP-Quadratic method
(Monotonicity Preserving Hermite interpolation with derivative
estimated by fitting a parabola (Quadratic polynomial)). Basically, it
is Catmull-Rom with derivatives clamped so as to ensure monotonicity.

1D MP-quadratic (for curve, not surface, interpolation) is
described in

Accurate Monotone Cubic Interpolation, by Hung T. Huynh, published
in the SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis, Volume 30, Issue 1
(February 1993), pages 57-100, 1993. ISSN:0036-1429.

and in

NASA technical memorandum 103789, which can be downloaded from
ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19910011517_1991011517.pdf

In order to ensure reflexion symmetry about diagonal lines, 1D
MP-quadratic is performed two different ways---horizontally then
vertically, and vertically then horizontally---and
averaged. (Symmetry about 45 degree lines is not automatically
respected because MP-quadratic is a nonlinear method: interpolating
horizontally then vertically does not necessarily give the same as
interpolating vertically then horizontally.)

Upsharp is interpolatory, co-monotone and exact on linears.

Future improvements: This method is likely to replace the final stage
of the upsize and upsmooth methods, which will make them smoother and,
at least in the case of upsize, less aliased. In addition, Chantal
Racette has recently figured out how to implement this method using
one third less minmod function evaluations, which should make it run
considerably faster: specifically, a much simplified version of

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicubic_interpolation

can be used instead of the current approach. Finally, current research
suggests that the co-monotonicity enforcing derivative clamping is
overkill and that the result would be less aliased without a
noticeable increase in haloing if it only enforced strong boundedness.

===================
Upsharpfast sampler
===================

Upsharpfast is an efficient (noticeably faster than the current GEGL
bicubic) implementation of Catmull-Rom:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_Hermite_spline

Upsharpfast is interpolatory and exact on linears.

==============
Upsize sampler
==============

Upsize is an implementation of Nohalo level 2 ("Nohalo" = "no halo"),
which is obtained by performing two diagonal straightening
subdivisions of the input image, finishing with bilinear
interpolation.

Nohalo level 2 is an unpublished, state of the art method.

Upsize is interpolatory, co-monotone and exact on linears.

It is especially suited for enlarging colour photographs (which
typically are sub-critical, that is, have smallest relevant
details/transitions which are several pixel wide).

Future improvements: Research by Chantal Racette suggests that one
level of subdivision (that is, Nohalo level 1) followed by a variant
of symmetrized MP-quadratic instead of bilinear may yield a better
method than Nohalo level 2.

==================
Upsizefast sampler
==================

Upsizefast is an implementation of Nohalo level 1, which is described
in

CPU, SMP and GPU implementations of Nohalo level 1, a fast co-convex
antialiasing image resampler, by Nicolas Robidoux, Minglun Gong,
John Cupitt, Adam Turcotte and Kirk Martinez, published in the
Proceedings of the Canadian Conference on Computer Science &
Software Engineering, C3S2E 2009, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, May
19-21, 2009, ACM International Conference Proceedings Series, pages
185-195. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1557626.1557657

Nohalo level 1 consists of one diagonal straightening subdivision
followed by bilinear interpolation.

Upsizefast is interpolatory, co-monotone and exact on linears.

================
Upsmooth sampler
================

Upsmooth is an implementation of (the simplest version of) Snohalo
level 2 ("Snohalo" = "smooth no halo"), which consists of Nohalo level
2 preceded by a de-noising and antialiasing smoothing convolution
tuned so that a sharp black on white diagonal line or interface is
straight following the first subdivision.

Snohalo level 2 is an unpublished, state of the art method.

Upsmooth is co-monotone and exact on linears.

Upsmooth is strongly anti-aliasing. It is especially suited for
enlarging text, "old school" game characters, and heavily
(destructively) compressed images and photographs (jpg with heavy
compression, for example).

Future improvements: It is possible that applying smoothing between
every level instead of only initially, or doing one level of
subdivision and then using a relative of symmetrized MP-quadratic as a
finishing scheme, will yield better results.

====================
Upsmoothfast sampler
====================

Upsmoothfast is an implementation of Snohalo level 1, which consists
of Nohalo level 1 preceded by the antialiasing blur.

Snohalo level 1 is another unpublished, state-of-the-art method.

Upsmoothfast is co-monotone and exact on linears.

=================
Downsharp sampler
=================

Downsharp is an exact area method which is similar to exact area box
filtering with an averaging rectangle that has sides 1/sqrt(2) of
those of the smallest rectangle (with sides aligned with untransformed
coordinate axes) which contains the approximate inverse image of an
"output" pixel area (a square centered at the sampling location in
transformed space, with sides, of length one, aligned with the
axes). The inverse image is approximated using the inverse Jacobian
matrix of the transformation. The averaging is done over the "minmod
surface" which is implicit to the S/Nohalo methods.

The 1/sqrt(2) factor ensures that when the transformation does not
downsample in any direction, the sampler is interpolatory. It also
implies that, of the six downsamplers, it is the one which behaves
most like nearest neighbour (although it is very different from it).

Downsharp is yet another unpublished method.

Downsharp is co-monotone and exact on linears. When upsampling, it is
also interpolatory.

Downsharp is well-suited for producing thumbnails and other
transformations (perspective?) in which large areas become a single
pixel.

Future improvements: Fix things so that downsampling ratios larger
than about 100 are better handled. The simplest way would be to have
the downsamplers use a larger buffer than the current 64x64;
otherwise, use branching and multiple "get pointer to input buffer"
calls if necessary. And, as mentioned above, possibly get rid of
it.

================
Downsize sampler
================

Downsize is like downsharp except that the rectangle always fully
contains the approximate inverse image of a pixel area.

Downsize is yet another unpublished method. It was inspired
somewhat by the PDL::Transform method of Craig DeForest.

Downsize is co-monotone. When upsizing (no rotation or warp), it is
interpolatory and exact on linears.

Downsize is well-suited for producing thumbnails etc.

Future improvements: Like downsharp, better handling of very large
downsampling ratios. It is possible that averaging over the actual
approximate inverse image, or over a related disk or ellipse, give
better results than over the smallest containing rectangle
(programming this well is a non-trivial programming task).

==================
Downsmooth sampler
==================

Downsmooth is like downsize except that the rectangle is twice
the size required to contain the approximate inverse image of a pixel
area.

Downsmooth is yet another unpublished method.

Downsmooth is co-monotone and exact on linears.

Downsmooth is well-suited for producing thumbnails etc.

Future improvements: Like downsize, better large downsampling ratio
handling. Also: The rectangular averaging box is not optimal: Current
research suggests that a "cross" would produce thumbnails with both
less blur and less aliasing. The current version is too blurry for my
taste.

==============================================
Downsharpfast, Downsizefast and Downsmoothfast
==============================================

They are like their "slow" counterparts except that the reconstructed
surface which is averaged is the nearest neighbour one (the piecewise
constant reconstruction) instead of the minmod surface.

They are co-monotone.

=================================================================
When perspective and more general warping are implemented in GEGL
=================================================================

In order to adjust the size of the averaging rectangle, the
downsamplers need information about the transformation which uses
them. We have implemented the samplers so that they use inverse
Jacobian matrix information. This is trivial to obtain in GEGL because
affine transformations already compute the inverse of their linear
part.

When non-affine transformations get implemented, similar information
will have to be passed on to the down methods. The inverse Jacobian
matrix does not need to be exact: Any halfway reasonable approximation
will do (of course, for perspective transformations, the exact inverse
Jacobian matrix is easy to compute). Note that when the transformation
upsamples (in one or both directions), the corresponding side lengths
(which are, in principle, small, since a pixel area in the transformed
image "comes" from a very small area of the input image) are clamped
up to 1; for this reason, it is not very important to program an
inverse Jacobian matrix which is accurate where the transformation
"blows up."

Adam Turcotte can provide additional details regarding
implementation. Also see the source code.

_______________________________________________
Gegl-developer mailing list
Gegl-developer@lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU
https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gegl-developer

Sent: 2009-09-01 16:22:31 UTC (over 2 years ago)

From: Nicolas Robidoux

new GEGL samplers: what they are and where they are going (REVISED)

permalink

========
Abstract
========

Eric Daoust and Adam Turcotte are about to wrap up a pair of Google
Summer of Code 2009 projects having to do with new samplers. In this
document, I explain what the samplers do, how they (may) fit within
the GEGL library, and where they are going (most likely: feedback
would be nice).

I also briefly indicate what will need to be done when non-affine
transformations (perspective, warp) are implemented in GEGL so that
they use the samplers tuned for downsampling (for example, thumbnail
production) with maximal benefit.

=============
QUICK SUMMARY
=============

In total, twelve new samplers were programmed:

six samplers tuned for transformations in which good downsampling is
more important than good upsampling (for example, thumbnail
production):

downsize, downsharp, downsmooth and their simplified/faster versions
downsizefast, downsharpfast and downsmoothfast

and

six samplers tuned for transformations in which good upsampling is
more important than good downsampling (for example, image enlargement
and rotation):

upsize, upsharp, upsmooth and their simplified/faster versions
upsizefast, upsharpfast and upsmoothfast

(Note: Perspective transformations often are both upsampling and
downsampling, depending on the location and even the direction.)

Every sampler can be used for any resampling task (enlarging,
shrinking, rotating, perspective, warping...). "Sampler tuned for X"
means that the sampler is built to excel at task X. It does not mean
that it does poorly at other tasks.

The naming convention which Adam, Eric and I used (which could be
changed) is as follows:

"up*" samplers are tuned for upsampling, "down*" samplers are tuned
for downsampling,

"*sharp*" samplers maximise sharpness at the expense of increased
aliasing ("jaggies"); *sharp* samplers behave more like nearest
neighbour than the other methods. "*smooth*" samplers minimise
jaggies at the expense of additional blur. "*size*" samplers are a
compromise between the two.

"*fast are simplified/faster versions. If "fast" is omitted, the
corresponding method is the higher quality/slower version.

As implemented for GEGL, none of the above methods are parameterised.

The distinguishing feature of the methods (except upsharpfast) is that
they do not introduce any haloing artifacts, and yet do well at
antialiasing (esp. upsize, upsmooth and the future version of
downsmooth).

================
Relevant patches
================

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=588336
(remove the yafr sampler)

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=588180
(remove the sharp sampler, and add upsharp)

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=588193
(add upsharpfast, upsizefast and upsmoothfast)

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=592498
(add upsize)

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=592515
(add upsmooth)

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=588016
(add downsharp, downsize, downsmooth)

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=592349
(add downsharpfast, downsizefast and downsmoothfast)

(Non-sampler patches which Eric and Adam produced are not included here.)

====================
Where this is going?
====================

If it is felt that GEGL does not need "pretty good fast samplers," the
"*fast" methods could simply not be integrated into GEGL (or made
"public"). If and when GEGL has "quality levels," one could write a
driver which selects the fast method when the chosen quality level is
low. In any case, programming the "*fast" methods was not a waste: The
s/nohalo family of methods is multi-stage, hence the "cheaper"
versions are used as stages for the "non-fast" ones; in addition, the
improved fast versions programmed for GSoC will be ported to
VIPS. This being said, it would be nice if they could be merged into
GEGL trunk and then removed, so that the git repository have a record
of them.

Keeping the "*fast" methods private (or not merging them at all) would
reduce the total number of "public" GEGL methods from twelve to
six. The following would further reduce the total number of methods to
four (or eight if "*fast" samplers are kept).

Downsampling schemes: The downsize and downsharp samplers are very
similar. For this reason, it would make sense to only keep the
downsize and downsmooth samplers (same with downsizefast and
downsmoothfast). Note that I am not 100% sure that users will prefer
the downsize method to the downsharp method: it depends on whether
they dislike aliasing (jaggies) more than than blur. (I dislike
aliasing, hence my preference for downsize.)

The upsize and upsharp samplers are very different from each other,
but research performed by Chantal Racette as part of her Laurentian
University Honours Thesis during the Summer suggests that the method
underlying upsharp should be used as a final stage for the
multi-stage methods upsize and upsmooth, yielding superior methods
which would replace the current upsize and upsmooth and make the
current upsharp obsolete.

So, in the end, there could only be four new additional GEGL samplers:

Two samplers tuned for downsampling: downsize and downsmooth (with
fast versions downsizefast and downsmoothfast if desired)

Two samplers tuned for upsampling: upsize and upsmooth (with fast
versions upsizefast and upsmoothfast)

Every single sampler is a good general purpose method. The downsize
method, in particular, will be found to give acceptable results in
"all" situations (no worse, and generally better, than bilinear when
upsampling, and much better than bilinear when downsampling). For this
reason, I think that downsize may be a good default GEGL sampler.

===================
DETAILED DISCUSSION
===================

===========
Terminology
===========

"Samplers" are methods like nearest neighbour, bilinear, bicubic,
lanczos, Catmull-Rom etc. This is what they do: Given a bitmap image
(which, at least in principle, specifies pixel values at pixel
locations only), samplers are used to obtain pixel values at
arbitrary locations, which is required when resizing, rotating,
applying perspective transformations etc.

Many key sampler properties are easier to explain in terms of the
"reconstructed surface," which is the surface obtained by "plotting"
the pixel values at all possible locations (not only the original
pixel locations) as if they were heights (the discussion is simpler
if one thinks about greyscale images).

A sampler is differentiable if the reconstructed surface has a well
defined tangent at every point (there is no "ridge," "sharp peak" or
other types of "corners"). Such ridges are visible, for example,
when using bilinear to perform a high ratio enlargement.

An "interpolatory sampler" is one such that if a value is requested
at an original pixel location, the pixel value returned is the
original pixel value, unchanged. In other words, the reconstructed
surface goes through the original image data points. Nearest
neighbour, bilinear, bicubic, lanczos and Catmull-Rom are
interpolatory; smoothing bicubic spline (the current GEGL bicubic
default) is not. Many non-interpolatory samplers are smoothing. In
addition, many exact-area samplers are non-interpolatory.

A co-monotone sampler has the following property: If the data (pixel
values) is non-increasing or non-decreasing (in some direction,
generally parallel to the axes), then the reconstructed surface has
the same property between the corresponding locations. A co-monotone
sampler does not introduce "haloing." Nearest neighbour, bilinear
and smoothing bicubic splines are co-monotone; Lanczos and
Catmull-Rom are not co-monotone (and they often introduce
significant haloing).

A strongly bounded sampler has the following property: The resampled
value is always between between the values at the four nearest input
pixel locations. If a sampler is monotone, then it is strongly
bounded; the converse is not true. A strongly bounded sampler can
only add haloing at sub-pixel scale, and the amount of haloing is
strongly limited. Nearest neighbour, bilinear and smoothing bicubic
splines are strongly bounded; Lanczos and Catmull-Rom are
not. Bounded samplers do not require clamping.

A sampler is "exact on linears" if the reconstructed surface is a
plane (far enough from the boundary) whenever the input image's
pixel values all lie on a plane. Bilinear, smoothing bicubic splines
and Catmull-Rom are exact on linears; nearest neighbour and Lanczos
are not (I need to double check for Lanczos).

==================================
Description of the twelve samplers
==================================

See the source code for details and additional comments.

===============
Upsharp sampler
===============

"Upsharp" is an implementation of the symmetrized MP-Quadratic method
(Monotonicity Preserving Hermite interpolation with derivative
estimated by fitting a parabola (Quadratic polynomial)). Basically, it
is Catmull-Rom with derivatives clamped so as to ensure monotonicity.

1D MP-quadratic (for curve, not surface, interpolation) is
described in

Accurate Monotone Cubic Interpolation, by Hung T. Huynh, published
in the SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis, Volume 30, Issue 1
(February 1993), pages 57-100, 1993. ISSN:0036-1429.

and in

NASA technical memorandum 103789, which can be downloaded from
ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19910011517_1991011517.pdf

In order to ensure reflexion symmetry about diagonal lines, 1D
MP-quadratic is performed two different ways---horizontally then
vertically, and vertically then horizontally---and
averaged. (Symmetry about 45 degree lines is not automatically
respected because MP-quadratic is a nonlinear method: interpolating
horizontally then vertically does not necessarily give the same as
interpolating vertically then horizontally.)

Upsharp is interpolatory, co-monotone, exact on linears and
differentiable.

Future improvements: This method is likely to replace the final stage
of the upsize and upsmooth methods, which will make them smoother and,
at least in the case of upsize, less aliased. In addition, Chantal
Racette has recently figured out how to implement this method using
one third less minmod function evaluations, which should make it run
considerably faster: specifically, a much simplified version of

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicubic_interpolation

can be used instead of the current approach. Finally, current research
suggests that the co-monotonicity enforcing derivative clamping is
overkill and that the result would be less aliased without a
noticeable increase in haloing if it only enforced strong boundedness.

===================
Upsharpfast sampler
===================

Upsharpfast is an efficient (noticeably faster than the current GEGL
bicubic) implementation of Catmull-Rom:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_Hermite_spline

Upsharpfast is interpolatory, exact on linears and differentiable.

==============
Upsize sampler
==============

Upsize is an implementation of Nohalo level 2 ("Nohalo" = "no halo"),
which is obtained by performing two diagonal straightening
subdivisions of the input image, finishing with bilinear
interpolation.

Nohalo level 2 is an unpublished, state of the art method.

Upsize is interpolatory, co-monotone and exact on linears.

It is especially suited for enlarging colour photographs (which
typically are sub-critical, that is, have smallest relevant
details/transitions which are several pixel wide).

Future improvements: Research by Chantal Racette suggests that one
level of subdivision (that is, Nohalo level 1) followed by a variant
of symmetrized MP-quadratic instead of bilinear may yield a better
method than Nohalo level 2.

==================
Upsizefast sampler
==================

Upsizefast is an implementation of Nohalo level 1, which is described
in

CPU, SMP and GPU implementations of Nohalo level 1, a fast co-convex
antialiasing image resampler, by Nicolas Robidoux, Minglun Gong,
John Cupitt, Adam Turcotte and Kirk Martinez, published in the
Proceedings of the Canadian Conference on Computer Science &
Software Engineering, C3S2E 2009, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, May
19-21, 2009, ACM International Conference Proceedings Series, pages
185-195. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1557626.1557657

Nohalo level 1 consists of one diagonal straightening subdivision
followed by bilinear interpolation.

Upsizefast is interpolatory, co-monotone and exact on linears.

================
Upsmooth sampler
================

Upsmooth is an implementation of (the simplest version of) Snohalo
level 2 ("Snohalo" = "smooth no halo"), which consists of Nohalo level
2 preceded by a de-noising and antialiasing smoothing convolution
tuned so that a sharp black on white diagonal line or interface is
straight following the first subdivision.

Snohalo level 2 is an unpublished, state of the art method.

Upsmooth is co-monotone and exact on linears. Although upsmooth is not
differentiable (it will be if and when MP-quadratic is used as final
stage) this is only apparent for large upsampling ratios.

Upsmooth is strongly anti-aliasing. It is especially suited for
enlarging text, "old school" game characters, and heavily
(destructively) compressed images and photographs (jpg with heavy
compression, for example).

Future improvements: It is possible that applying smoothing between
every level instead of only initially (as was done for the mock ups in
Adam Turcotte's GSoC web site), or doing one level of subdivision and
then using a relative of symmetrized MP-quadratic as a finishing
scheme, yield better results.

====================
Upsmoothfast sampler
====================

Upsmoothfast is an implementation of Snohalo level 1, which consists
of Nohalo level 1 preceded by the antialiasing blur.

Snohalo level 1 is another unpublished, state-of-the-art method.

Upsmoothfast is co-monotone and exact on linears.

=================
Downsharp sampler
=================

Downsharp is an exact area method which is similar to exact area box
filtering with an averaging rectangle that has sides 1/sqrt(2) of
those of the smallest rectangle (with sides aligned with untransformed
coordinate axes) which contains the approximate inverse image of an
"output" pixel area (a square centered at the sampling location in
transformed space, with sides, of length one, aligned with the
axes). The inverse image is approximated using the inverse Jacobian
matrix of the transformation. The averaging is done over the "minmod
surface" which is implicit to the S/Nohalo methods.

The 1/sqrt(2) factor ensures that when the transformation does not
downsample in any direction, the sampler is interpolatory. It also
implies that, of the six downsamplers, it is the one which behaves
most like nearest neighbour (although it is very different from it).

Downsharp is yet another unpublished method.

Downsharp is co-monotone and exact on linears. When upsampling, it is
interpolatory.

Downsharp is well-suited for producing thumbnails and other
transformations (perspective?) in which large areas become a single
pixel.

Future improvements: Fix things so that downsampling ratios larger
than about 100 are better handled. The simplest way would be to have
the downsamplers use a larger buffer than the current 64x64 (128x128,
for example); otherwise, using branching and multiple "get pointer to
input buffer" calls if necessary would do the job.

================
Downsize sampler
================

Downsize is like downsharp except that the rectangle always fully
contains the approximate inverse image of a pixel area.

Downsize is yet another unpublished method. It was inspired
somewhat by the PDL::Transform method of Craig DeForest.

Downsize is co-monotone. When upsizing (no rotation or warp), it is
interpolatory and exact on linears.

Downsize is well-suited for producing thumbnails etc.

Future improvements: Like for downsharp, better handling of very large
downsampling ratios. It is possible that averaging over the actual
approximate inverse image, or over a related disk or ellipse, give
better results than over the smallest containing rectangle.

==================
Downsmooth sampler
==================

Downsmooth is like downsize except that the rectangle is (at least)
twice the size required to contain the approximate inverse image of a
pixel area.

Downsmooth is yet another unpublished method.

Downsmooth is co-monotone and exact on linears.

Downsmooth is well-suited for producing thumbnails etc.

Future improvements: Like for downsize, better large downsampling
ratio handling. Also: The rectangular averaging box is not optimal:
Current research suggests that a "cross" would produce thumbnails with
both less blur and less aliasing.

==============================================
Downsharpfast, Downsizefast and Downsmoothfast
==============================================

They are like their "slow" counterparts except that the reconstructed
surface which is averaged is the nearest neighbour one (the piecewise
constant reconstruction) instead of the minmod surface.

They are co-monotone. Downsharpfast is exact on linears when
upsampling and downsizefast is exact on linears when enlarging.

=================================================================
When perspective and more general warping are implemented in GEGL
=================================================================

In order to adjust the size of the averaging rectangle, the
downsamplers need information about the transformation which uses
them. We have implemented the samplers so that they use inverse
Jacobian matrix information. This is trivial to obtain in GEGL because
affine transformations already compute the inverse of their linear
part.

When non-affine transformations get implemented, similar information
will have to be passed on to the down methods. The inverse Jacobian
matrix does not need to be exact: Any halfway reasonable approximation
will do (of course, for perspective transformations, the exact inverse
Jacobian matrix is easy to compute). Note that when the transformation
upsamples (in one or both directions), the corresponding side lengths
(which are, in principle, small, since a pixel area in the transformed
image "comes" from a very small area of the input image) are clamped
up to 1; for this reason, it is not very important to program an
inverse Jacobian matrix which is accurate where the transformation
"blows up."

Adam Turcotte can provide additional details regarding
implementation. Also see the source code of his patch

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=588016

_______________________________________________
Gegl-developer mailing list
Gegl-developer@lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU
https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gegl-developer

Sent: 2009-09-01 16:41:58 UTC (over 2 years ago)

From: Alexandre Prokoudine

new GEGL samplers: what they are and where they are going (REVISED)

permalink

On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 6:22 PM, Nicolas Robidoux wrote:

> ========
> Abstract
> ========
>
> Eric Daoust and Adam Turcotte are about to wrap up a pair of Google
> Summer of Code 2009 projects having to do with new samplers.  In this
> document, I explain what the samplers do, how they (may) fit within
> the GEGL library, and where they are going (most likely: feedback
> would be nice).

One thing most of your mails need is a section which states that it
would be legal to use any part of the text in the user manual :)

Alexandre

_______________________________________________
Gegl-developer mailing list
Gegl-developer@lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU
https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gegl-developer

Sent: 2009-09-03 19:42:46 UTC (over 2 years ago)

From: Nicolas Robidoux

new GEGL samplers: what they are and where they are going

permalink

RE:

> ===============
> Upsharp sampler
> ===============

> ...

> Future improvements: ...Finally, current research
> suggests that the co-monotonicity enforcing derivative clamping is
> overkill and that the result would be less aliased without a
> noticeable increase in haloing if it only enforced strong boundedness.

More current research suggests that the standard "three times the
difference" rule (Fritsch and Carlson et al) is just about as good as
it gets, so this future improvement won't be.

Nicolas Robidoux

_______________________________________________
Gegl-developer mailing list
Gegl-developer@lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU
https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gegl-developer

Sent: 2009-09-03 21:09:49 UTC (over 2 years ago)

From: Martin Nordholts

new GEGL samplers: what they are and where they are going (REVISED)

permalink

On 09/01/2009 04:22 PM, Nicolas Robidoux wrote:
>
> ========
> Abstract
> ========
>
> Eric Daoust and Adam Turcotte are about to wrap up a pair of Google
> Summer of Code 2009 projects having to do with new samplers. In this
> document, I explain what the samplers do, how they (may) fit within
> the GEGL library, and where they are going (most likely: feedback
> would be nice).
>
> I also briefly indicate what will need to be done when non-affine
> transformations (perspective, warp) are implemented in GEGL so that
> they use the samplers tuned for downsampling (for example, thumbnail
> production) with maximal benefit.

Thanks a lot for this detailed info

I'll make sure that your work is merged to master sooner or later (but it could take a while before I find the time to do it)

BR,
Martin

_______________________________________________
Gegl-developer mailing list
Gegl-developer@lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU
https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gegl-developer

Sent: 2009-09-18 03:51:45 UTC (over 2 years ago)

From: Nicolas Robidoux

new GEGL samplers: what they are and where they are going

permalink

Question about future direction for resamplers:

Would it be better if there was only one sampler tuned for upsampling,
and one tuned for downsampling?

My previous vision for GEGL was that my research group would
contribute TWO resamplers tuned for upsampling and TWO resamplers
tuned for downsampling. The four new samplers would (eventually)
integrate the best of the 16 resamplers programmed by Eric and Adam
for GSoC 2009. Within each of the two pairs of resamplers, one was to
be "interpolatory" (and more aliased) and the other would minimally
blur (and be less aliased).

Now: I just figured out how to use the Jacobian matrix information so
that the sampler only add noticeable antialiasing blur when the
operation is performing significant upsampling or downsampling. What
this means for the resamplers tuned for upsampling, for example, is
that we could seamlessly integrate Nohalo and Snohalo in such a way
that the sampler behaves like Nohalo when translating and rotating
(hence is "blur free") but behaves increasingly like Snohalo as the
transformation (locally) deviates from being distance preserving
(hence is more anti-aliased), resulting in one single sampler which
would please everyone and their father.

I imagine that a few people would want the added control over the
aliasing vs blur trade-off which having pairs of methods would provide
(also, methods can be faster if they are not jack of all trades).

But I am wondering if for GEGL's target user base an "always pretty
good" default is preferable to "choose your poison."

Comments?

Nicolas Robidoux
Universite Laurentienne

_______________________________________________
Gegl-developer mailing list
Gegl-developer@lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU
https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gegl-developer

Sent: 2009-09-18 07:14:19 UTC (over 2 years ago)

From: Martin Nordholts

new GEGL samplers: what they are and where they are going

permalink

On 09/18/2009 03:51 AM, Nicolas Robidoux wrote:
> But I am wondering if for GEGL's target user base an "always pretty
> good" default is preferable to "choose your poison."
>
> Comments?

As long as there is good general-purpose resampler (which could
possibly use different algorithms depending on if it is dealing
with downscaling or upscaling) I'm happy. Everything else is bonus
to me.

BR,
Martin

--

My GIMP Blog:
http://www.chromecode.com/

_______________________________________________
Gegl-developer mailing list
Gegl-developer@lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU
https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gegl-developer

Sent: 2009-09-18 17:10:59 UTC (over 2 years ago)

From: Daniel Rogers

new GEGL samplers: what they are and where they are going

permalink

On Sep 17, 2009, at 6:51 PM, Nicolas Robidoux wrote:

> But I am wondering if for GEGL's target user base an "always pretty
> good" default is preferable to "choose your poison."

Well, if all GEGL ever has is a "always pretty good" default and you
never get to pick your poison, you are making your decision for your
users. And frankly, "always pretty good" is not as cut and dry and
you'd like to think, off the top of my head here are some image
processing applications I can think of that have dramatically
different requirements in a resize operation (I speak from experience
here, I've been involved with most of the items on this list):

High throughput print on demand rendering services. (Think
snapfish.com and their ilk.)
medical research. (MRI, CT, PET, ultrasound scanners)
astrophysics research.
general physics experimentation (anyone using a camera for measurements)
embedded systems (printers, kiosks, etc)
real time video processing

And of course applications like The GIMP.

All of these require different tradeoffs for their resamplers. I've
seen downsamplers that preserve bluriness so you can show a thumbnail
that is representative of the bluriness you see in a printed product.
Rescaling text, it's often important to worry less about aliasing and
more about blur. Nearest neighbor is actually a perfect resize
operation for a large class of artificial images. Medical scientists
are much more worried about introducing artifacts that could be
misinterpreted as disease, or potentially blurring away evidence of
such. Anyone using a camera for measurements is (depending on the
measurement) often more interested in geometric stability, regardless
of blur or aliasing. Real time video is often about speed.

I think a better question is to ask, are you going to limit GEGL to
being used solely by The GIMP, and then, only the subset of GIMP users
you think exist, or are you going to allow your users to create the
facilities to use GEGL is applications you did not originally envision.

For me the obvious choice is the latter. Making GEGL suitable for as
broad a range of applications as possible gets you a larger user base
and, if done right, higher quality code. The Linux kernel is a great
example of this.

--
Daniel
_______________________________________________
Gegl-developer mailing list
Gegl-developer@lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU
https://lists.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/mailman/listinfo/gegl-developer