Pamsistoaglyph User Manual(1)

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 index.html#commonoptions ), 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

Copyright (C) 2009 Scott Pakin, scott+pbm@pakin.org

SEE ALSO

•   pamstereogram(1)

•   ppm3d(1) ,

•   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereogram (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereogram)

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