Senior Project - BREW

Graphics Information, Inc. (GII) produces imaging software, primarily for the oil and gas industry. This project involved the development of an X Window System based image display utility to be used as a component in an interactive mapping system for both the oil and gas and the environmental information industries. People in these industries deal frequently with information in some visual form: maps of oil fields, aerial photographs, and graphical well logs representing various properties of an oil well as a function of depth are just three examples. Some of these pieces of information take the form of paper rolls encompassing approximately 40 square feet. When the need for a particular piece of information arises, the GII customer typically must go to a library physically housing the information, locate the desired information, check it out, and bring it back to the office for analysis. This is a slow, time-consuming process.

GII has digitized much of this information in TIFF B compressed form, and wanted a means of displaying it on a computer workstation screen. This presented two major problems. First, most of the images are so large that only a tiny fraction of the image can be made visible on a screen at one time. Secondly, the manipulation of an image requires the handling of many megabytes of data, which is typically a very slow process. The student project solved both of these problems. The result was an X Window System and Motif-based widget, written in C, that, when provided a TIFF B compressed image, allows a user to interactively scroll about the image, scale the image, and rotate the image, all at relatively high speeds. The software was implemented on IBM RISC 6000 workstations under the AIX operating system.