Shawn Lankton Online

Python is a very nice programming language. Fast. Simple. Free. I recently spent some time learning it for a class on computer vision. I was using the PIL and numpy packages to make Python feel more like my old friend Matlab.

The two functions that I couldn’t find, and missed the most (especially when writing hack-y code for class projects) were median filtering and morphological dilation. So, in hopes of sparing other the pain of writing them… here they are! The function medfilt_dilate.py has both functions.

medfilt_dilate.py

The medfilt() function uses the PIL filtering code. The dilate() function was written from scratch with NumPy.

After spending about an hour fighting with PIL (Python Imaging Library) and trying to get it to install properly with all of its dependencies I discovered that some wonderful person posted a ready-made pil installer for osx. This worked like a charm. First try. No problems.

God I love it when people do stuff like this. Now, hang on as I learn to do image processing with Python on my mac.