David Finlayson wrote:

I am considering developing an application in Squeak for the analysis and processing of sonar data. The most interesting part of the program is a visual analysis tool that would be used for filtering, mosaicking and GIS-type analysis. Superficially, it would resemble and indeed work a lot like a photo editing application, only instead of working with R,G,B values, each pixel in the image represents a complex matrix of information derived from the sonar system, the vessel GPS and motion sensors, etc. ImageJ for sonars, if you will.

A lot of people would code this type of thing in C++ or C#, but I see some value in a dynamic system like Smalltalk that would make it easy to add new complex filters that allow us to do interesting research on sonar analysis. I am willing to give up performance to gain a powerful development environment.

The question is: is Squeak the right smalltalk for this kind of thing? Does it have the support for images, matrix algebra, plain old performance for signal processing to build a photo-shop-like application? I guess it has been used for Robot control, which would have similar performance demands. What do you think?

Maybe there is some cool stuff that could be done with Morphic to go places a photoshop-type application can't go. Maybe Morphic will suck at this type of thing, I don't know.

I am only half way through Squeak By Example, and I am probably biting off more than I can chew, but maybe not?

Take a look at Video and Image Processing

http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/2411

It is a framework for applying filters on images and video, duh ;-) It's quite easy to make your own filter rules etc.

Karl