J has some support for manipulating image files. It also has opengl support. I'm not sure if J8 has image file support yet (I have not tried to use it yet) but J6 has convenient support for a variety of image file formats (http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Addons/media/platimg).
However, if you use current J implementations for image processing you should expect to spend a lot of time re-thinking things. A lot of the literature about image processing is written from a "machine instruction" perspective, or not much more abstract than that. And while opengl shaders can be used, J itself currently has not implemented tools to efficiently transform its code into arbitrary machine instructions. For J to be fast, you have to use its primitives to operate on "large" quantities of data. Or, I think it should be possible to use opengl shaders in J7 or J8. They have been re-built in part because of issues like how hard it was in J6 to use features of opengl like shaders. But, personally, I have not yet taken the time to exercise this ability in the new systems (J is a spare-time effort, for me, and I have a broad range of interests). On the other hand, you can develop code in J and then when you find a performance bottleneck you can re-implement just that operation in C (http://www.jsoftware.com/help/user/dlls.htm). But this translation currently needs to be a manual operation. We have not yet built tools that work this way. Also, since C code has an independent existence in the operating system and building C code has dependences on the specific machine, you wind up with dependencies on the OS and on the machine configuration. And, of course, you would also need to be using C (hypothetically other languages can be used, but I am not sure which ones can build efficient shared libraries). Also, if you are going to use J for image processing, I think the only good book that's been published so far that has relevance to image processing and is specific to J is Cliff Reiter's "Fractals, Visualization and J". And maybe we can get some image file support into J8 (we can, I just do not think I have time to do that, myself). I hope this helps, and I hope other people speak up on this topic (I might have stated something incorrectly). Thanks, On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 7:23 AM, Sarah Arnold <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi > > I'm new to J (and virtually to programming in general). I have just finished > reading the J Primer. For my PHD I need to do some image processing. I was > wondering whether J was a good choice for image processing, since the > language works so fine with arrays. At the moment, I'm mostly using Wolfram > Mathematica, which I like a lot, but it is also very slow. > > Is J fast? Does there already exist a library for image processing tasks? > > Any help is appreciated! > Sarah > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
