The IMAGE team of the research laboratory GREYC in Caen/France is pleased to announce the release of a new major version (numbered 2.0) of its project G’MIC: a generic, extensible, and open source framework for image processing. Here, we present the main advances made in the software since our last article. The new features presented here include the work carried out over the last twelve months (versions 2.0.0 and 1.7.x, for _x_ varying from _2_ to _9_).

Links:

• G’MIC main project page
• Twitter feed
• G’MIC plug-in for GIMP
• G’MIC Online web service
• Changelog for the 2.0.0 version

1. G’MIC: A brief overview

G’MIC is an open-source project started in August 2008, by the IMAGE team. This French research team specializes in the fields of algorithms and mathematics for image processing. G’MIC is distributed under the CeCILL license (which is GPL compatible) and is available for multiple platforms (GNU/Linux, MacOS and Windows). It provides a variety of user interfaces for manipulating generic image data, that is to say, _2D_ or _3D_ multispectral images (or sequences) with floating-point pixel values. This includes, of course, “classic” color images.

The popularity of G’MIC mostly comes from the plug-in it provides for GIMP (since 2009). To date, there are more than 480 different filters and effects to apply to your images, which considerably enlarges the list of image processing filters available by default in GIMP.

G’MIC also provides a powerful and autonomous command-line interface, which is complementary to the CLI tools you can find in the famous ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick projects. There is also a web service G’MIC Online, allowing to apply image processing effects directly from a browser. Other (but less well known) G’MIC-based interfaces exist: a webcam streaming tool ZArt, a plug-in for Krita, a subset of filters available in Photoflow, Blender or Natron… All these interfaces are based on the CImg and libgmic libraries, that are portable, thread-safe and multi-threaded, via the use of OpenMP.

G’MIC has more than 950 different and configurable processing functions, for a library of only 6.5Mio, representing a bit more than 180 kloc. The processing functions cover a wide spectrum of the image processing field, offering algorithms for geometric manipulations, colorimetric changes, image filtering (denoising and detail enhancement by spectral, variational, non-local methods, etc.), motion estimation and registration, display of primitives (_2D_ or _3D_ mesh objects), edge detection, object segmentation, artistic rendering, etc. It is therefore a very generic tool for various uses, useful on the one hand for converting, visualizing and exploring image data, and on the other hand for designing complex image processing pipelines and algorithms (see these project slides for details).

2. A new versatile interface, based on Qt

One of the major new features of this version 2.0 is the re-implementation of the plug-in code, from scratch. The repository G’MIC-Qt developed by Sébastien (an experienced member of the team) is a _Qt_-based version of the plug-in interface, being as independent as possible of the widget API provided by GIMP.

This has several interesting consequences:

• The plug-in uses its own widgets (in _Qt_) which makes it possible to have a more flexible and customizable interface than with the GTK widgets used by the GIMP plug-in API: for instance, the preview window becomes resizable at will, manages zooming by mouse wheel, and can be freely moved to the left or to the right. A filter search engine by keywords has been added, as well as the possibility of choosing between a light or dark theme. The management of favorite filters has been also improved and the interface even offers a new mode for setting the visibility of the filters. Interface personalization is now a reality.

• The plug-in also defines its own API, which is used to facilitate its integration in third party software (other than GIMP). In practice, a software developer has to write a single file host_software.cpp implementing the functions of the API to make the link between the plug-in and the host application. Currently, the file host_gimp.cpp does this for GIMP as a host. But there is now also a stand-alone version available (file host_none.cpp that runs this _Qt_ interface in solo mode, from a shell (with command gmic_qt).

• Boudewijn Rempt, project manager and developer of the marvelous painting software Krita, has also started writing such a file host_krita.cpp to make this “new generation” plug-in communicate with Krita. In the long term, this should replace the previous G’MIC plug-in implementation they made (currently distributed with Krita), which is aging and poses maintenance problems for developers.

Minimizing the integration effort for developers, sharing the G’MIC plug-in code between different applications, and offering a user interface that is as comfortable as possible, have been the main objectives of this complete redesign. As you can imagine, this rewriting required a long and sustained effort, and we can only hope that this will raise interest among other software developers, where having a consistent set of image processing filters could be useful (a file host_blender.cpp available soon ? We can dream!). The animation below illustrates some of the features offered by this new _Qt_-based interface.

Note that the old plug-in code written in GTK was updated also to work with the new version 2.0 of G’MIC, but has fewer features and probably will not evolve anymore in the future, unlike the _Qt_ version.

3. Easing the work of cartoonists…

One of G’MIC’s purposes is to offer more filters and functions to process images. And that is precisely something where we have not relaxed our efforts, despite the number of filters already available in the previous versions!

In particular, this version comes with new and improved filters to ease the colorization of line-art. Indeed, we had the chance to host the artist David Revoy for a few days at the lab. David is well known to lovers of art and free software by his multiple contributions in these fields (in particular, his web comic Pepper & Carrot is a must-read!). In collaboration with David, we worked on the design of an original automatic line-art coloring filter, named Smart Coloring.

When drawing comics, the colorization of line-art is carried out in two successive steps: The original drawing in gray levels (Fig.3.2.[1]) is first pre-colored with solid areas, i.e. by assigning a unique color to each region or distinct object in the drawing (Fig.3.2.[3]). In a second step, the colourist reworks this pre-coloring, adding shadows, lights and modifying the colorimetric ambiance, in order to obtain the final colorization result (Fig.3.2.[4]). Practically, flat coloring results in the creation of a new layer that contains only piecewise constant color zones, thus forming a colored partition of the plane. This layer is then merged with the original line-art to get the colored rendering (merging both in multiplication mode, typically).

Artists admit it themselves: flat coloring is a long and tedious process, requiring patience and precision. Classical tools available in digital painting or image editing software do not make this task easy. For example, even most filling tools (bucket fill) do not handle discontinuities in drawn lines very well (Fig.3.3.a), and even worse when lines are anti-aliased. It is then common for the artist to perform flat coloring by painting the colors manually with a brush on a separate layer (Fig.3.3.b), with all the precision problems that this supposes (especially around the contour lines, Fig.3.3.c). See also this link for more details.

It may even happen that the artist decides to explicitly constrain his style of drawing, for instance by using aliased brushes in a higher resolution image, and/or by forcing himself to draw only connected contours, in order to ease the flat colorization work that has to be done afterwards.

The Smart Coloring filter developed in version 2.0 of G’MIC allows to automatically pre-color an input line-art without much work. First, it analyses the local geometry of the contour lines (estimating their normals and curvatures). Second, it (virtually) does contour auto-completion using spline curves. This virtual closure allows then the algorithm to fill objects with disconnected contour plots. Besides, this filter has the advantage of being quite fast to compute and gives coloring results of similar quality to more expensive optimization techniques used in some proprietary software. This algorithm smoothly manages anti-aliased contour lines, and has two modes of colorization: by random colors (Fig.3.2.[2] and Fig.3.4) or guided by color markers placed beforehand by the user (Fig.3.5).

In “random” mode, the filter generates a piecewise constant layer that is very easy to recolor with correct hues afterwards. This layer indeed contains only flat color regions, and the classic bucket fill tool is effective here to quickly reassign a coherent color to each existing region synthesized by the algorithm.

In the user-guided markers mode, color spots placed by the user are extrapolated in such a way that it respects the geometry of the original drawing as much as possible, taking into account the discontinuities in the pencil lines, as this is clearly illustrated by the figure below:

This innovative, flat coloring algorithm has been pre-published on HAL (in French): A semi-guided high-performance flat coloring algorithm for line-arts. Curious people could find there all the technical details of the algorithm used. The recurring discussions we had with David Revoy on the development of this filter enabled us to improve the algorithm step by step, until it became really usable in production. This method has been used successfully (and therefore validated) for the pre-colorization of the whole episode 22 of the webcomic Pepper & Carrot.

The wisest of you know that G’MIC already had a line-art colorization filter! True, but unfortunately it did not manage disconnected contour lines so well (such as the example in Fig.3.5), and could then require the user to place a large number of color spots to guide the algorithm properly. In practice, the performance of the new flat coloring algorithm is far superior.

And since it does not see any objection to anti-aliased lines, why not create ones? That is the purpose of another new filter “Repair / Smooth [antialias]“ able to add anti-aliasing to lines in cartoons that would have been originally drawn with aliased brushes.

4. …Not to forget the photographers!

“Colorizing drawings is nice, but my photos are already in color!”, kindly remarks the impatient photographer. Don’t be cruel! Many new filters related to the transformation and enhancement of photos have been also added in G’MIC 2.0. Let’s take a quick look of what we have.

4.1. CLUTs and colorimetric transformations

CLUTs (Color Lookup Tables) are functions for colorimetric transformations defined in the RGB cube: for each color (Rs,Gs,Bs) of a source image _Is_, a CLUT assigns a new color (Rd,Gd,Bd) transferred to the destination image _Id_ at the same position. These processing functions may be truly arbitrary, thus very different effects can be obtained according to the different CLUTs used. Photographers are therefore generally fond of them (especially since these CLUTs are also a good way to simulate the color rendering of certain old films).

In practice, a CLUT is stored as a _3D_ volumetric color image (possibly “unwrapped” along the z = B axis to get a _2D_ version). This may quickly become cumbersome when several hundreds of CLUTs have to be managed. Fortunately, G’MIC has a quite efficient CLUT compression algorithm (already mentioned in a previous article), which has been improved version after version. So it was finally in a quite relax atmosphere that we added more than 60 new CLUT-based transformations in G’MIC, for a total of 359 CLUTs usable, all stored in a data file that does exceed 1.2 Mio. By the way, let us thank Pat David, Marc Roovers and Stuart Sowerby for their contributions to these color transformations.

But what if you already have your own CLUT files and want to use them in GIMP? No problem ! The new filter “Film emulation / User-defined“ allows to apply such transformations from CLUT data file, with a partial support of files with extension .cube (CLUT file format proposed by Adobe, and encoded in ASCII o_O!).

And for the most demanding, who are not satisfied with the existing pre-defined CLUTs, we have designed a very versatile filter “Colors / Customize CLUT“, that allows the user to build their own custom CLUT from scratch: the user places colored keypoints in the RGB color cube and these markers are interpolated in _3D_ (according to a Delaunay triangulation) in order to rebuild a complete CLUT, i.e. a dense function in RGB. This is extremely flexible, as in the example below, where the filter has been used to change the colorimetric ambiance of a landscape, mainly altering the color of the sky. Of course, the synthesized CLUT can be saved as a file and reused later for other photographs, or even in other software supporting this type of color transformations (for example RawTherapee or Darktable).

To stay in the field of color manipulation, let us also mention the appearance of the filter “Colors / Retro fade“ which creates a “retro” rendering of an image with grain generated by successive averages of random quantizations of an input color image.

4.2. Making the details pop out

Many photographers are looking for ways to process their digital photographs so as to bring out the smallest details of their images, sometimes even to exaggeration, and we can find some of them in the pixls.us forum. Looking at how they perform allowed us to add several new filters for detail and contrast enhancement in G’MIC. In particular, we can mention the filters “Artistic / Illustration look“ and “Artistic / Highlight bloom“, which are direct re-implementations of the tutorials and scripts written by Sébastien Guyader as well as the filter “Light & Shadows / Pop shadows“ suggested by Morgan Hardwood. Being immersed in such a community of photographers and cool guys always gives opportunities to implement interesting new effects!

In the same vein, G’MIC gets its own implementation of the Multi-scale Retinex algorithm, something that was already present in GIMP, but here enriched with additional controls to improve the luminance consistency in images.

Our friend and great contributor to G’MIC, Jérome Boulanger, also implemented and added a dehazing filter “Details / Dcp dehaze“ to attenuate the fog effect in photographs, based on the Dark Channel Prior algorithm. Setting the parameters of this filter is kinda hard, but the filter gives sometimes spectacular results.

And to finish with this subsection, let us mention the implementation in G’MIC of the Rolling Guidance algorithm, a method to simplify images that has become a key step used in many newly added filters. This was especially the case in this quite cool filter for image sharpening, available in “Details / Sharpen [texture]“. This filter works in two successive steps: First, the image is separated into a texture component + a color component, then the details of the texture component only are enhanced before the image is recomposed. This approach makes it possible to highlight all the small details of an image, while minimizing the undesired halos near the contours, a recurring problem happening with more classical sharpening methods (such as the well known Unsharp Mask).

4.3. Masking by color

As you may know, a lot of photograph retouching techniques require the creation of one or several “masks”, that is, the isolation of specific areas of an image to receive differentiated processing. For example, the very common technique of luminosity masks is a way to treat differently shadows and highlights in an image. G’MIC 2.0 introduces a new interesting filter “Colors / Color mask [interactive]“ that implements a relatively sophisticated algorithm (albeit computationally demanding) to help creating complex masks. This filter asks the user to hover the mouse over a few pixels that are representative of the region to keep. The algorithm learns in real time the corresponding set of colors or luminosities and deduces then the set of pixels that composes the mask for the whole image (using Principal Component Analysis on the RGB samples).

Once the mask has been generated by the filter, the user can easily modify the corresponding pixels with any type of processing. The example below illustrates the use of this filter to drastically change the color of a car

It takes no more than a minute and a half to complete, as shown in the video below:

This other video exposes an identical technique to change the color of the sky in a landscape.

5. And for the others…

Since illustrators and photographers are now satisfied, let’s move on to some more exotic filters, recently added to G’MIC, with interesting outcomes!

5.1. Average and median of a series of images

Have you ever wondered how to easily estimate the average or median frame of a sequence of input images? The libre aficionado Pat David, creator of the site pixls.us often asked the question. First of all when he tried to denoise images by combining several shots of a same scene. Then he wanted to simulate a longer exposure time by averaging photographs taken successively. And finally, calculating averages of various kind of images for artistic purposes (for example, frames of music video clips, covers of Playboy magazine or celebrity portraits).

Hence, with his cooperation, we added new commands -median_files,-median_videos, -average_files and-average_videos to compute all these image features very easily using the CLI tool gmic. The example below shows the results obtained from a sub-sequence of the « Big Buck Bunny“ video. We have simply invoked the following commands from the Bash shell:

$ gmic -average_video bigbuckbunny.mp4 -normalize 0.255 -o average.jpg
$ gmic -median_video bigbuckbunny.mp4 -normalize 0.255 -o median.jpg

And to stay in the field of video processing, we can also mention the addition of the commands -morph_files and -morph_video that render temporal interpolations of video sequences, taking the estimated intra-frame object motion into account, thanks to a quite smart variational and multi-scale estimation algorithm.

The video below illustrates the rendering difference obtained for the retiming of a sequence using temporal interpolation, with (right) and without (left) motion estimation.

5.2. Deformations and “Glitch Art”

Those who like to mistreat their images aggressively will be delighted to learn that a bunch of new image deformation and degradation effects have appeared in G’MIC.

First of all, the filter “Deformations / Conformal maps“ allows one to distort an image using conformal maps. These deformations have the property of preserving the angles locally, and are most often expressed as functions of complex numbers. In addition to playing with predefined deformations, this filter allows budding mathematicians to experiment with their own complex formulas.

Fans of Glitch Art may also be concerned by several new filters whose rendering look like image encoding or compression artifacts. The effect “Degradations / Pixel sort“ sorts the pixels of a picture by row or by column according to different criteria and to possibly masked regions, as initially described on this page.

Degradations / /Pixel sort also has two little brothers, filters “Degradations / Flip & rotate blocks“ and “Degradations / Warp by intensity“. The first divides an image into blocks and allows to rotate or mirror them, potentially only for certain color characteristics (like hue or saturation, for instance).

The second locally deforms an image with more or less amplitude, according to its local geometry. Here again, this can lead to the generation of very strange images.

It should be noted that these filters were largely inspired by the Polyglitch plug-in, available for Paint.NET, and have been implemented after a suggestion from a friendly user (yes, yes, we try to listen to our most friendly users!).

5.3. Image simplification

What else do we have in store? A new image abstraction filter, Artistic / Sharp abstract, based on the Rolling Guidance algorithm mentioned before. This filter applies contour-preserving smoothing to an image, and its main consequence is to remove the texture. The figure below illustrates its use to generate several levels of abstraction of the same input image, at different smoothing scales.

In the same vein, G’MIC also gets a filter Artistic / Posterize which degrades an image to simulate posterization. Unlike the filter with same name available by default in GIMP (which mainly tries to reduce the number of colors, i.e. do color quantization), our version adds spatial simplification and filtering to approach a little more the rendering of old posters.

5.4. Other filters

If you still want more (and in this case one could say you are damn greedy!), we will end this section by discussing some of the new, but unclassifiable filters.

We start with the filter “Artistic / Diffusion tensors“, which displays a field of diffusion tensors, calculated from the structure tensors of an image (structure tensors are symmetric and positive definite matrices, classically used for estimating the local image geometry). To be quite honest, this feature had not been originally developed for an artistic purpose, but users of the plug-in came across it by chance and asked to make a GIMP filter from it. And yes, this is finally quite pretty, isn’t it?

From a technical point of view, this filter was actually an opportunity to introduce new drawing features into the G’MIC mathematical evaluator, and it has now become quite easy to develop G’MIC scripts for rendering custom visualizations of various image data. This is what has been done for instance, with the command -display_quiver reimplemented from scratch, and which allows to generate this type of rendering:

For lovers of textures, we can mention the apparition of two new fun effects: First, the “Patterns / Camouflage“ filter. As its name suggests, this filter produces a military camouflage texture.

Second, the filter “Patterns / Crystal background“ overlays several randomly colored polygons in order to synthesize a texture that vaguely looks like a crystal seen under a microscope. Pretty useful to quickly render colored image backgrounds.

And to end this long overview of new G’MIC filters developed since last year, let us mention “Rendering / Barnsley fern“. This filter renders the well-known Barnsley fern fractal. For curious people, note that the related algorithm is available on Rosetta Code, with even a code version written in the G’MIC script language, namely:

# Put this into a new file 'fern.gmic' and invoke it from the command line, like this:
# $ gmic fern.gmic -barnsley_fern
barnsley_fern :
  1024,2048
  -skip {"
      f1 = [ 0,0,0,0.16 ];           g1 = [ 0,0 ];
      f2 = [ 0.2,-0.26,0.23,0.22 ];  g2 = [ 0,1.6 ];
      f3 = [ -0.15,0.28,0.26,0.24 ]; g3 = [ 0,0.44 ];
      f4 = [ 0.85,0.04,-0.04,0.85 ]; g4 = [ 0,1.6 ];
      xy = [ 0,0 ];
      for (n = 0, n<2e6, ++n,
        r = u(100);
        xy = r<=1?((f1**xy)+=g1):
             r<=8?((f2**xy)+=g2):
             r<=15?((f3**xy)+=g3):
                   ((f4**xy)+=g4);
        uv = xy*200 + [ 480,0 ];
        uv[1] = h - uv[1];
        I(uv) = 0.7*I(uv) + 0.3*255;
      )"}
  -r 40%,40%,1,1,2

And here is the rendering generated by this function:

6. Overall project improvements

All filters presented throughout this article constitute only the visible part of the G’MIC iceberg. They are in fact the result of many developments and improvements made “under the hood”, i.e., directly on the code of the G’MIC script language interpreter. This interpreter defines the basic language used to write all G’MIC filters and commands available to users. Over the past year, a lot of work has been done to improve the performances and the capabilities of this interpreter:

• The mathematical expressions evaluator has been considerably enriched and optimized, with more functions available (especially for matrix calculus), the support of strings, the introduction of const variables for faster evaluation, the ability to write variadic macros, to allocate dynamic buffers, and so on.

• New optimizations have been also introduced in the CImg library, including the parallelization of new functions (via the use of OpenMP). This C++ library provides the implementations of the “critical” image processing algorithms and its optimization has a direct impact on the performance of G’MIC (in this respect, note that CImg is also released with a major version 2.0).

• Compiling G’MIC on Windows now uses a more recent version of g++ (6.2 rather than 4.5), with the help of Sylvie Alexandre. This has actually a huge impact on the performances of the compiled executables: some filters run up to 60 times faster than with the previous binaries (this is the case for example, with the Deformations / Conformal Maps filter, discussed in section 5.2).

• The support of large .tiff images (format BigTIFF, with files that can be larger than 4Gb) is now enabled (read and write), as it is for 64-bit floating-point TIFF images

• The 3D rendering engine built into G’MIC has also been slightly improved, with the support for bump mapping. No filter currently uses this feature, but we never know, and prepare ourselves for the future!

• And as it is always good to relax after a hard day’s work, we added the game of Connect Four to G’MIC :). It can be launched via the shell command $ gmic -x_connect4 or via the plug-in filter “Various / Games & demos / Connect-4“. Note that it is even possible to play against the computer, which has a decent but not unbeatable skill (the very simple _AI_ uses the Minimax algorithm with a two-level decision tree).

Finally, let us mention the undergoing redesign work of the G’MIC Online web service, with a beta version already available for testing. This re-development of the site, done by Christophe Couronne and Véronique Robert (both members of the GREYC laboratory), has been designed to better adapt to mobile devices. The first tests are more than encouraging. Feel free to experiment and share your impressions!

7. What to remember?

First, the version 2.0 of G’MIC is clearly an important step in the project life, and the recent improvements are promising for the future developments. It seems that the number of users are increasing (and they are apparently satisfied!), and we hope that this will encourage open-source software developers to integrate our new G’MIC-Qt interface as a plug-in for their own software. In particular, we are hopeful to see the new G’MIC in action under Krita soon, this would be already a great step!

Second, G’MIC continues to be an active project, and evolve through meetings and discussions with members of artists and photographers communities (particularly those who populate the forums and IRC of pixls.us and GimpChat). You will likely able to find us there if you need more information, or just if you want to discuss things related to (open-source) image processing.

And while waiting for a future hypothetical article about a future release of G’MIC, you can always follow the day-after-day progress of the project via our Twitter feed.

Until then, long live open-source image processing!

Credit: Unless explicitly stated, the various non-synthetic images that illustrate this post come from Pixabay.