Senior Project - cake

Metrum (formerly a division of Honeywell) recently introduced a new model of color printer called the COLORADO. The COLORADO printer provides photographic quality color prints in seconds, combining the simplicity of desktop printing with the quality of photography in an affordable package. The full-shaded images are perfect for a variety of electronic imaging applications including medical imaging, government imaging, CAD/CAM and presentation graphics. However, the COLORADO printer accepts images to be printed only in TGA format. While this format is not particular to the COLORADO, there are many images produced today that are in a wide variety of other formats -- formats that cannot be printed by the COLORADO.

The task of this project was to develop a system which would allow a user to interactively describe an arbitrary source image file format, and then automatically generate a translator which would be capable of converting all images of that type to TGA format. These images could then be printed on the COLORADO. The interface was to be simple enough to allow a non-programmer to create the description of the image file from a written document. The system had to handle the different ways that pixels may be organized within a file or files, the different ways that pixels can be formatted into words/bytes, various types of color encodings within a pixel, color maps and color/gamma corrections, various compression schemes, and the various ancillary fields which can exist in some image formats. The software was written in C to run on a variety of PCs, UNIX workstations, and larger computers. The translators it produces (also written in C) are also portable to these environments. An additional capability allows the user to preview converted images at reduced resolution in an X Window System environment.