CamlImages - Objective Caml image processing library

Note: This library is currently under development.

0. What is CamlImages ?

This is an image processing library, which provides some basic functions of image processing and loading/saving various image file formats. In addition the library can handle huge images that cannot be (or can hardly be) stored into the memory (the library automatically creates swap files and escapes them to reduce the memory usage).

1. Installation

   Read the file INSTALL.

2. Using CamlImages

2.1 Color models

CamlImages supports the following color models:

* Rgb24 -- 24bit depth full color image
* Index8 -- 8bit depth indexed image with transparent information
* Index16 -- 16bit depth indexed image with transparent information

For each color models, the corresponding module is provided. Use the module Rgb24 if you want to access 24bit depth full color images, for example.

2.2 Load/Save image files and other fancy features

CamlImages supports loading and saving of the following file formats:

Bitmap (.bmp)
Tiff (.tiff or .tif), color only
Jpeg (.jpeg or .jpg)
Png  (.png)
    Ppm (.pbm, .pgm, .ppm), portable pixmaps
    PS (.ps, .eps), PostScript files
X Pixmap (.xpm), no saving
Gif (.gif) (not recommended)

For each image format, we provide a separate module. For instance, there is a Tiff module to load and save images stored in the tiff file format.

If you do not want to specify the file format, you can use Image.load: this function automatically analyses the header of the image file at hand and loads the image into the memory, if the library supports this format.

CamlImages also provides an interface to the internal image format of O'Caml's Graphics library (this way you can draw your image files into the Graphics window).

You can also draw strings on images using the Freetype library, which is an external library to load and render TrueType fonts.

2.3 Class interface

The modules begins the letter 'o' are the class interface for CamlImages.

2.4 Image swap

When you create/load a huge image, the computer memory may not be sufficient to contain all the data. (For example, this may happen if you are working with a scanned image of A4, 720dpi, 24bit fullcolor, even if you have up to 128Mb of memory!) To work with such huge images, CamlImages provides image swaps, which can escape part of the images into files stored on the hard disk. A huge image is thus partitioned into several blocks and if there is not enough free memory, the blocks which have not been accessed recently are swapped to temporary files. If a program requests to access to such a swapped block, the library silently loads it back into memory. By default, image swapping is disabled, because it slows down the programs. To activate this function, you have to modify Bitmap.maximum_live and Bitmap.maximum_block_size. Bitmap.maximum_live is the maximum heap live data size of the program (in words) and Bitmap.maximum_block_size is the maximum size of swap blocks (in words). For example, if you do not want to use more than 10M words (that is 40Mb for a 32bit architecture or 80Mb for a 64bit architecture), set Bitmap.maximum_live to 10000000. You may (and you should) enable heap compaction, look at the GC interface file, gc.mli, in the standard library for more details (you should change the compaction configuration). Bitmap.maximum_block_size affects the speed and frequency of image block swapping. If it is larger, each swapping becomes slower. If it is smaller, more swappings will occur. Too large and too small maximum_block_size, both may make the program slower. I suggest to have maximum_block_size set to !Bitmap.maximum_live / 10. If you activated image swapping, cache files for unused swapped blocks will be removed automatically by Caml GC finalization, but you may free them explicitly by hand also. The functions and methods named "destroy" will free those blocks. The swap files are usually created in the /tmp directory. If you set the environment variable "CAMLIMAGESTMPDIR", then its value replaces the default "/tmp" directory. The temporary files are erased when the program exits successfully. In other situations, for instance in case of spurious exception, you may need to erase temporary files manually.

3. Miscellaneous

3.1 How do I organize my Makefile to use the library ?

Put the following line at the top of your Makefile:

include /usr/local/lib/ocaml/camlimages/Makefile.config

The library directory can be different if the library is installed somewhere else. The variables COMPFLAGS_CAMLIMAGES and LINKFLAGS_CAMLIMAGES are defined in Makefile.config; you should add them to the compiler and linker options. A sample Makefile is available at sample/Makefile.sample.