Snapshot release of image package 2.1.1
The image package has accumulated a lot of changes since its last release and I'm hoping to make a new release soon (to match the release of Octave 3.8.0). I have prepared a snapshot tarball (version 2.1.1) with the current development status which can be installed easily with pkg. Would be great if users of the image package could give it a try and report any problems that the many changes may have caused.
It is important to note that this is not a final release. To make this clear, and to avoid that this becomes distributed as if it was, I made it dependent on an yet unreleased version of Octave (it is dependent on the development version of Octave anyway), and made it print a warning about it every time the package is loaded. After reading this, download the tarball and install it with:
pkg install -nodeps /path/to/tarball
I am partial to the changes in the new version, so these are the ones that I paid more attention to:
- complete rewrite of imdilate and imerode with a performance improvement and many compatibility bugs fixed;
- implementation of the @strel class and support for it in the image package functions;
- support for N-dimensional matrices in several functions;
- rewrite of the block processing functions which in some cases performs 1000x faster.
There are also a lot of bug fixes and new functions. Some will break backwards compatibility really bad but needed to be done for the sake of Matlab compatibility. For example, bwconncomp was returning indices for object perimeter but should have been returning indices for all elements in the objects. So do take a look at the NEWS file or use news image after installing the package.
After this release, I plan to follow the Octave core release method of keeping two development branches: a stable branch for minor releases with small bug fixes and regressions, and a default branch for big changes. Hopefully that will allow for more frequent releases as things of different levels get ready.
Please report any problems you have found either in Octave's bug or patch trackers.