Monday, January 3rd, 2011, 6:55 am
Ginput in Octave
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ESTERDAY I encountered my first major setback in Octave for Kubuntu. It was a bug, not a missing feature. It involved an outside library again. I tried installing a newer version of gnuplot (installing the latest one by compiling the source code), but this did not resolve the issue. All in all, over an hour was spent on it, first assuming that I was coding wrongly and later realising that the issue was upstream (there are many more threads like this and they dominate the discussion on the matter). Applying the patch manually would only be a short-term solution as it was already submitted for inclusion in future releases, so for the time being, where this function is needed, I will reluctantly be testing the code under MATLAB (for which I have an academic licence that everyone gets whether they want to or not). It was rather depressing to use MATLAB for a few hours yesterday. Compatibility will be assured again when the little issue (fixable with just a line or a few) is addressed also in the binaries offered by GNU/Linux distributions. Apart from that I’m having Fedora-Octave-ImageMagick compatibility issues [1, 2], which help not at all.
My overall experience with Octave is pleasant and it remains by far the primary choice for image analysis. But for others who insist on using MATLAB I must ensure cross-compatibility, thus the following (under Fedora):
The image shows the interface which now precedes the tracking phase. Points can be placed by the user with text guidance in the console. The interfaces were also improved to separate between rectangular, circular, and manual placements.
Here is an example image without the interface.
