Image back-end support

[John W. Eaton]

On 29-Mar-2008, Weldon Goree wrote:

| I'm making some progress on more image backends for loadimage, etc. In
| general I'm just calling the relevant native library to render to
| memory and then translating that to the Octave format; there's
| probably a much Better Way. Is anybody else working on this? If not, I
| expect to be done this semester (more to the point, I need to finish
| it this semester in order to use it for a DSP project next semester);
| the site mentions coding standards you like contributions to meet so
| if you could point me towards those I could start moving the code in
| that direction.

I don't think extending loadimage is what is needed.  Instead, for
Octave 3.1 we would like to include the imread and imwrite functions
that already exist in the Octave Forge image package.  These functions
use ImageMagick to read a variety of image formats.  There was some
discussion on this list recently about whether we should use the 
ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick++ library.  See this thread:

  http://www.nabble.com/merging-imread-and-imwrite-to15148052.html#a15354378

jwe