Multimedia Development System

ImageTcl is a Multimedia Software Development Environment under development by Charles B. Owen at Media and Entertainment Technology Laboratory at Michgan State University.  ImageTcl is designed to provide a highly modular rapid prototyping environment for image, audio, and signal processing. It incorporates features for temporal control and media data manipulation. ImageTcl was originally developed primarily as a mechanism for research in information retrieval in compressed digital video.  It is now actively utilized in many METLAB projects including video and audio database systems, music retrieval, and augmented reality. 

The new ImageTclAR augmented reality system is based on ImageTcl and is the current major use for the system.

The ImageTcl development team would like to thank Sun Microsystems for their support through an academic equipment grant.  This work was partially supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Version 2.18.00 is now available (as of March 8, 2007):

    ImageTcl_2_19_00.zip (50MB)  

This is a compiled executable of the system with all source code.  Extract to a directory.  Ensure you have a compatible ActiveTcl distribution installed (an installer is included in the components directory) and run the install.tcl script. 

If you do not have Visual Studio 2005 installed on your machine, you must install the Visual Studio 2005 Redistributables to run ImageTcl and ImageTclAR.  These can be obtained at:  Visual Studio 2005 Redistributables. 

Some of features of ImageTcl

• Support for a wide variety of image data formats including fixed and floating point, JPEG, Motion JPEG, monochrome and color, YUV, motion flow, Sun rasterimage, AVI, FFT spectral representations, image sequences as a volume.
• A powerful dataflow model with no critical paths through interpreted code.
• Threaded and multiprocessor support.
• A simple to use programming interface based on Tcl and the Tk Toolkit.
• Modular design which facilities the easy construction of new components for rapid prototyping.
• Automatic build tools.
• Automatic tools for assistance in creation of new data types and commands.

The ImageTcl command set includes:

• itaudiooutput - Support for live audio output.
• itconnect - Connects two ImageTcl dataflow objects.
• itdisconnect - Disconnects two ImageTcl dataflow objects.
• itdataconverter - Converts between differing format data streams.
• itfft - Support for Fourier conversions of images.
• itimagefilter - Implements image filtering operations.
• itimagemixer - Implements image mixing effects such as fades and keying.
• itimagevolume - Treats image sequence as a 3D volume.
• itimagevolumeview - Flexible viewer for image volume objects.
• itimagewarp - Provides for image warping effects.
• itmediafilein - Input from a variety of image and sound file formats.
• itmediafileout - Output to a variety of image and sound file formats.
• itmjpegdecompress - Motion JPEG decompression.
• itopticalflow - Implements popular motion analysis algorithms.
• itpacketrouter - Allows for switched connections in the dataflow model.
• itvideoinput - Live video input.
• itimage - Creates an image display window supporting all image formats.

ImageTcl algorithm support:

• Difference, Roberts, Prewitt, and Sobel image gradients.
• Horn and Schunck optical flow.
• Szeliski spline based image registration.
• Bilinear interpolation image warping.
• Convolution based image warping.
• FFT and Inverse FFT support.

ImageTcl hardware support:

Windows 2000/XP.