[sane-devel] Digital ICE support

[Major A]

> > You've missed the first point: the IR information must be extracted
> > first. Since the IR channel is a non-linear combination of the defect
> > map with the R, G, B channels, this might get rather tricky. IBM has a
> > patent on this as well.
> 
> Hmm, can you elaborate? Can't the backend simply do the second "scan"
> when reading the IR channel is enabled and operate with that? Well,
> that's what I can do manually so I can imagine it'd be hard, but not
> unsolvable.

The coolscan2 backend currently provides the IR data in a second scan,
but this is only a kludge for the moment, it will go away with SANE2
(which will support RGBI).

This IR data is the raw data which contains quite a lot of red
information as well, for most films. You need to extract the pure IR
information, and that's probably best done by adding the cubic roots
of the four channels with appropriate weighting factors and then raise
the result to the power of 3.

> > >   - Group adjacent defect pixels into defect clusters
> > 
> > What for?
> 
> - Being able to treat one defect at a time.

Probably a good idea, I need to think about this one.

> - Giving feedback to the user about the recognized defects, possibly
> with means to influence the correction process.

I don't think that would be very practical if IR processing is done
during scanning. This could be useful while writing and debugging the
code, though.

> > I would just add all adjacent pixels, no threshold necessary.
> 
> Um, the defect cluster should contain defect pixels only -- we don't
> want to "repair" pixels that are already ok.

In my experience, you have to mark all adjacent pixels as
defective. If, for example, you have dust on a patch of sky, you could
easily end up having a visible ring around the place where the dust
was, simply because the surrounding pixels didn't quite reach the
second threshold.

> > Also, you have to treat any parts of the image that are obscured by,
> > say, the slide mount, separately. Otherwise they will also fall in the
> > category of dirty pixels, and interpolating a large area for nothing
> > is probably the last thing you want to spend your CPU time on.
> 
> Agreed. Recognizing the framing etc. should be fairly easy though from
> what I've seen -- it's really "black" and always at the edge of the
> scan.

Careful: it doesn't always surround the scan, you can adjust your scan
window so that the border between two frames falls within the scan
window. Also, some cameras print a date/time/whatever on the space
between frames, which would also mess up the assumption that the black
area is rectangular.

I think it's probably better to use a clustering approach and just
omit clusters that get too big.

> > I'd love to have defect removal functionality in SANE, so please let
> > me know if you have any good ideas and maybe we can one day make
> > something that rivals ICE.
> 
> You mean e.g. not giving up on Kodak slides? I have many of this type,
> so I'll love to have it as well.

I assume you mean Kodachrome? I think it's possible to do IR cleaning
on Kodachrome, but it's a lot harder than for E6 and C41 because the
IR channel is more strongly correlated with other colours than in the
case of E6/C41.

  Andras

===========================================================================
Major Andras
    e-mail: andras at users.sourceforge.net
    www:    http://andras.webhop.org/
===========================================================================