Pamsistoaglyph User Manual

Section: Misc. Reference Manual Pages (0)
Updated: 5 April 2009
Page Index

NAME

pamsistoaglyph - convert a single-image stereogram to a red/cyan anaglyphic image

SYNOPSIS

pamsistoaglyph [--invert] [--sep=number] [--minsep=number] [--gray=number] [in_netpbmfile

All options can be abbreviated to their shortest unique prefix. You may use either white space or an equals sign between an option name and its value.

DESCRIPTION

This program is part of Netpbm(1).

pamsistoaglyph reads a Netpbm image as input and produces a Netpbm image as output.

pamsistoaglyph takes a single-image stereogram (SIS) such as those produced by pamstereogram(1) and converts it to a red/cyan anaglyphic image such as those produced by ppm3d(1). Many people have trouble tricking their eyes into focusing beyond the image in front of them and are therefore unable to perceive the 3-D shape hidden within a single-image stereogram. Anaglyphic stereograms are easier to perceive in 3-D but require a pair of red/cyan glasses such as those often used to watch 3-D movies. The goal of pamsistoaglyph is to help people who have trouble viewing single-image stereograms see the intriguing 3-D effect.

pamsistoaglyph can convert single-image random-dot stereograms (SIRDS), wallpaper stereograms, and even dual-image stereograms to anaglyphic images.

OPTIONS

In addition to the options common to all programs based on libnetpbm (most notably -quiet, see
Common Options ), pamsistoaglyph recognizes the following command line options:

For most images, no command-line options need to be specified. The following options are available, however, for unusual circumstances.

--invert

Swap the left- and right-eye
    images. pamsistoaglyph assumes that its input
    represents a wall-eyed stereogram and generates the anaglyphic
    image accordingly. If the generated image appears to recede into
    the page where it should pop out of the page (and vice versa),
    this typically implies that the input image represents a
    cross-eyed stereogram. Use --invert to correct
    the image depth.

--sep=number

Specify the distance in pixels between the left- and right-eye
    images. Essentially, this corresponds to the distance between
    repetitions of the background pattern.  The --sep
    option should rarely be necessary
    as pamsistoaglyph is fairly good at determining
    automatically the eye-separation distance.

--minsep=number

This option is similar to --sep but
    constrains pamsistoaglyph only to
    a minimum eye-separation distance. Any distance larger
    than number is acceptable.  The --minsep
    option should rarely be necessary
    as pamsistoaglyph is fairly good at determining
    automatically the eye-separation distance.  The default value for
    the minimum eye-separation distance is 10% of the image width;
    this value seems to work well in practice.

--gray=number

Limit the number of gray levels to use when searching for the
    optimal eye-separation
    distance.  Because pamsistoaglyph looks for
    repeated patterns, it is vulnerable to being confused by slight
    variations in color.  By reducing the input image to grayscale and
    capping the number of gray levels,
    pamsistoaglyph ameliorates the effects of
    unintentional color variations (such as those caused by conversion
    from a low-quality JPEG image, for example). The default of 63
    seems to work well so the --gray option should
    rarely be necessary.

NOTES

The registration algorithm used by pamsistoaglyph was developed specifically for this program. As far as the author knows, there are no existing algorithms for converting stereograms to anaglyphs. The algorithm works as follows:

•

Convert the image to grayscale to increase the ability to identify
matches.

•

Count the number of pixels that match N pixels ahead in the
image for all N in [1, width/2].

•

Maintain a running mean (mu) and standard deviation (sigma) of
the number of matched pixels.

•

Store the N corresponding to each spike in the number of
    matched pixels. A spike is defined as a tally that exceeds the
    mean plus one, two, or three standard deviations. Only the first
    spike of a given standard-deviation multiplier is stored.

•

If a tally greater than mu+3sigma was encountered, return the
    corresponding N. If not, then if a tally greater than
    mu+2sigma was encountered, return the
    corresponding N. If not, then if a tally greater than
    mu+sigma was encountered, return the
    corresponding N. If not, then return the N that
    produces the minimum average distance between matched pixels
    (i.e., #matches divided by #pixels). If no
    such N exceeds the minimum allowable eye-separation value,
    return zero to indicate failure.

•

If the algorithm returned zero, rerun the algorithm independently
    on each row of the input image and return the median of
    all N that exceed the minimum allowable eye-separation
    value. If no such N exists, abort with an error
    message.

HISTORY

Scott Pakin wrote pamsistoaglyph in April 2009. It first appeared in Netpbm in Release 10.47 (June 2009).

AUTHOR

DOCUMENT SOURCE

This manual page was generated by the Netpbm tool 'makeman' from HTML source. The master documentation is at

: http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pamsistoaglyph.html

Pamsistoaglyph User Manual

NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

OPTIONS

NOTES

HISTORY

AUTHOR

SEE ALSO

DOCUMENT SOURCE

Index