Cross Platform & Shader Coding

I haven’t installed windows for quite while and I was quite suprised by how long it took me to set everything up.  For one the windows XP installer takes ages compared to e.g. the latest ubuntu installer.  And getting everything set up for development took a lot longer than I am used to on Linux as well (you just kind of fall in love with apt after a while i suppose; it makes installing things so easy and fast).

Anyways, enough complaining. I just submitted some more changes to svn and so the project now compiles on Windows as well.

Now on to some more shader programming.  I started working on shaders for dilating and eroding the image.  I can use those for a highpass filter, but I have also been trying to write a shader that converts the image into the frequency domain (ala Fourier transform) that would make a highpass filter really easy and also allows one to combine certain filters more efficiently.

Next week I also get to meet with a graphics prof at my university.  I was talking to him about the project and he is going to help me work out the best (we can come up with) way of detecting and tracking the blobs.  The usual approaches to connected component analysis dont work well on the GPU, as they rely sequential scans of the image array and information from pixels visited before the current one.  On the GPU the computations are perfomed in parallel instead…but I’m pretty sure we can work some GPU magic with the geometry shaders that are supported by newer graphics cards