I am making this post to the developers mailing list to see if anyone has ideas
about areas in the Apache Commons Imaging project that would benefit from
performance enhancements. Last year, I had a requirement through my job to
support TIFF images in Java. I selected the Apache Imaging package (which was
called Sanselan at the time) because it offered a pure Java solution and
avoided the hassles associated with the Java Advanced Imaging add-on. Since
then, I've put in some of my own time polishing up the image-reading operations
to improve the speed of rendering. I've had some success and was wondering if
there were other file formats supported by Apache Imaging that might benefit
from similar attention. Of course, the situation for TIFF is a little
different from that of the more mainstream formats such as JPEG, PNG, and GIF
which are directly supported by image ImageIO. I'd be less inclined to work
on formats that already have good support, but if there were special
requirements that could be addressed through Apache Imaging I'd be willing to
take a look at them.
Just to give a sense of what's possible, consider the speed improvements to the
TIFF format. This morning, I used a test application called
ApacheImagingSpeedAndMemory from the Apache Imaging code distribution to run
time trials on the original Sanselan 0.97 incubation version of Apache Imaging
and the lastest code trunk. For a largish 10,000 by 10,000 pixel image, the
original version required 15.9 seconds and used 679.8 megabytes of memory to
load the image. The new version required 1.9 seconds and used 383.2 megabytes.
For a smaller 3,600-by-1,800 pixel image, the load times were reduced from
0.89 seconds to 0.095. I wish I could say that I did something really cool
to get these improvements, but the truth is that it was just old-fashioned
coding and recognizing areas where redundant processing could be avoided.
Anyway, I don't have a huge amount of free time to throw at this project, but
if anyone comes up with an interesting idea, I might be willing to give it a
shot.
Gary
Computer Programming is the Art of the Possible
Gary W. Lucas, Senior Software Engineer
Sonalysts, Inc.
215 Parkway North
Waterford, CT 06385
(860) 326-3682
41-22-12.35 N / 72-10-07.54 W (USNG/MGRS: 18T YL 36787 83711)
