Thread: image processing question..

This is not an easy subject to explain in one post.

Image processing contains MANY different subjects - for example, sharpening or blurrinare a different subjects than face or number plate recognition [although to some extent they are related in the sense that the recognition subjects relate to detecting edges of light vs. dark areas, which in turn involves scanning for transitions of some level or high contrast between one pixel and the next - or perhaps over a radius/range of 3-4 pixels going from light to dark or the other way around].

So what sort of image processing are you going to do?

A dsp is not really much different from a regular processor - the main difference is that it's got specialized hardware to perform certain types of math quickly (in particular "multiply and accumulate", so it can do something like x = a * b + c (or x = a * b + x or some other variation on that theme) as one instruction so that it can do LOTS of those in a short period of time. Regular processors can do the same thing, but it takes a faster processor to do the same thing).

To write a new copy of photoshop would probably require a team of some 50-100 people a couple of years, although I believe from what I've read/heard that Tom Knoll and two-three other people wrote the first version in about 2 years - and it had all the basic functions you get when you buy the current version - although I think it did not have layers - and you had to have a Mac to run it. I don't think there are that many lines of the original code in the current version tho'.

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Mats

Originally Posted by kypronite

wow,It took a lot of people to build photoshop(I though it's around 20 people)...
by minimum,it tooks few years??I read there's one guy who take 8 years creating drawing program alone,pixel and it still haven't reach 1.0 version.
Anyway,thanks for your response.Yeah,you are right,there's alot of stuff there in image processing.I guess I still had a long way to go :P

I have no idea how many people ACTUALLY were active in the creation of PhotoShop, but the credits of PS 7 which is the latest version I've got is a LONG list - how many of those actively worked on it, and how many "gave advice for 3 hours each month for 2 years" is a different question.

And understanding one or two techniques within image processing is different than completing the entire set of functions available in for example PhotoShop - there are LOTS of functions there, most of which no one ever uses more than twice in a life.

If you take a simple drawing program (say MS Paint) it can probably be written in a few months by a productive and suitably skilled programmer. But anything much beyond that would take quite a bit more time, because paint does mostly simple stuff, and the more advanced you go, the more complex the task is, and the more time needs to be spent.

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Mats