The following paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the Conference on Domain-Specific Languages Santa Barbara, California, October 1997 Programming Language Support for Digitized Images or, The Monsters in the Closet Daniel E. Stevenson and Margaret M. Fleck University of Iowa For more information about USENIX Association contact: 1. Phone: 510 528-8649 2. FAX: 510 548-5738 3. Email:
[email protected] 4. WWW URL:http://www.usenix.org Programming Language Supp ort for Digitized Images or, The Monsters in the Closet y Daniel E. Stevenson Margaret M. Fleck Department of Computer Science Departmentof Computer Science University of Iowa University of Iowa Iowa City,IA 52242, USA Iowa City, IA 52242, USA Abstract rapid spread of images is particularly obvious on the World-Wide Web. Although many users require only image pro cessing Computer vision image understanding algorithms and graphics packages e.g. xv, Photoshop, an in- are dicult to write, debug, maintain, and share. creasing range of applications require basic image This complicates col laboration, teaching, and repli- understanding. For example, researchers in the sci- cation of research results. This paper shows how ences and medicine use images to measure physical user-level code can be simpli ed by providing bet- prop erties e.g. blood vessel width and screen for ter programming language constructs, particularly interesting events e.g. unusual cell shap es. Com- a new abstract data type cal led a \sheet." These panies, governments, non-pro t organizations e.g. primitives have been implemented as an extension museums, and private citizens are converting photo to Scheme.