Building a Cocoa application using a custom Core Image filter (introduction)

A couple of months ago, some members of my team were working on a facial recognition project for one of our customers. One thing they were trying to do was to determine if filtering the images in various ways could improve the recognition algorithm.

They were implementing their system in Java, but I immediately thought that Core Image would make their job much faster, since we could offload the image processing to the graphics cards on our Mac Pros rather than writing the algorithms in Java.

If you are not familiar, Core Image is Apple's image processing framework which can provide very high performance image processing by offloading the work of image processing to the graphics card. Core Image includes a huge number of image filters (just check out the list on the Apple web page).

The test system applied a sequence of image convolution filters to images with varying coefficients and then submitted the filtered images to the recognition system where they would be scored. We iterated over different combinations of filters to find a way to improve the scoring of the algorithm in general.

I was surprised to discover that Apple did not include a convolution filter by default. Convolution is the "jack of all trades" of image processing algorithms and can be used for all sorts of things like edge detection, sharpening, blurring, noise reduction, and so on, depending on the coefficients used.

This meant that I would have to develop my own custom image unit that performed convolution. This seemed like it might be a difficult task, but it turned out to be much easier than I expected. Along the way I learned a lot more about Quartz Composer, programming using the Open GL shading language, Cocoa Bindings, and creating custom image units on Mac OS X.

Over the next several posts I'll step through the development process to a working sample Cocoa application that allows you to apply convolution to any image.

Hello

Welcome to my blog. I'm a senior level engineer who's exploring developing software for OS X and using Cocoa. As I discover new things, I plan on posting my experience here with the humble hope that I might be able to help someone else and that other folks might be able to help me.

Other things of interest to me might find their way here as well. We'll see.

Thanks for tuning in,
Paul