Question

I thought of writing a piece of software which does Alpha Compositing. I didn’t wanted ready made code off from internet so I tried to find research papers and other sources to understand the mathematical algorithms, and initiated to implement.

But, I got lost very quickly. So my question is,

How should I approach these papers to extract the necessary details from it in order to write algorithm based on it. Any specific set of steps which works well?

Desired answer :

1. Read …
2. Extract …
3. Understand …
4. Implement …

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Note: This question is not limited to only Alpha Compositing, so more generalised approach will be helpful. I have tagged Java and C++, because thats my desired language to implement the image processing.

What I have done so far?

This is not a homework question but it is of course better to say what I know. I have read wiki of Alpha compositing, and few closely related Image compositing research papers. But, I stuck at the next step to take in order to go from understanding to implementation.

1. Wikipedia
2. Technical Memo, Image compositing

Answer 1

Have you implemented any image processing algorithms? Maybe start with something a little simpler, like desaturation/color intensification, reversal (side to side and upside down), rotating, scaling, and compositing images through a mask.

Once you have those figured out, you will be in a very good position to do an alpha composite.

I agree that academic papers seem to go out of their way to make implementation details muddy and uncertain. I find that large amounts of simplification to what is written is needed to begin to perform a practical implementation. In their haste to be general, writers excessively parameterize every aspect. To build useful, reliable software, it is necessary to start with something simple which actually works so that it can be a framework to add features. To do that, it is necessary to throw away 80–90 percent of the academic generality. Often much can be done with a raft of symbolic constants, but abandoning generality (say for four and five dimensional images) doesn’t really lose anything in practice.