This is the fifth public release of Olena, a generic image processing
library in C++.

Olena is a project developed by the EPITA Research and Development
Laboratory (www.lrde.epita.fr) since 1997.  We did numerous prototypes
and throw-away experiments before settling into the kind of
programming paradigm which is finally here.

This version of Olena is quite young.  In fact most of the operators
have been translated from the sources of Milena, an image processing
library which works only on 2D images (Milena stands for "mini-Olena")
and which is not publicly available.

Therefore this code is still experimental and not very polished.
The file named ISSUE, in the root directory of the distribution,
contains a list of known issues about Olena.

We haven't written a real documentation yet.  In the doc/ directory
you will find the start of a reference manual which presently
documents only the morphological operators.  In the demo/ directory
lie a few sample programs.  The file demo/tour.cc attempts to
introduce you to the basics of Olena.  For the rest, we're afraid you
will have to dig the code or e-mail us.

Please direct any question or comments to <olena@lrde.epita.fr>,
or <olena-bugs@lrde.epita.fr>.

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This code has been tested with GCC 2.95.3, GCC 3.0.4, and GCC 3.1.

To compile the libray, run

  ./configure
  make

If you want to install the headers files (the library IS the set
of headers, there is no binary) on your system, do

  make install

this will install the files in /usr/local/include/oln.
You can tune the '/usr/local/include' part of the path
by passing an --includedir option to configure. For
instance

  ./configure --includedir=/foo/bar
  make install

will install the files in /foo/bar/oln.

There are a few programs in the demo/ directory.  You can
built these programs using `make demo' in this directory.

  cd demo
  make demo

It is also easy to build the demo/ files manually, just include
the src/ directory in the include search path of the compiler.

  cd demo
  g++ -I../src -Wall -O2 tour.cc

With GCC 2.95.x, it's likely you will need to allow the compiler
to instantiate templates to a greater depth than the default (17),
using an option like -ftemplate-depth-50.

Finally, the tests/ directory contains a few programs that ensure some
features of the library behave as expected.  You can run them using
`make check' from the top directory (be prepared to wait).  If you
have to work in this area, please read tests/README.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Further information about Olena, can be found into the following
related papers:

* Thierry Géraud, Yoann Fabre, Dimitri Papadopoulos-Orfanos, and
  Jean-François Mangin.  Vers une réutilisabilité totale des
  algorithmes de traitement d'images.  In the Proceedings of the 17th
  Symposium GRETSI on Signal and Image Processing, vol. 2, pages
  331-334, Vannes, France, September 1999.  In French (available in
  english as Technical Report 9902: Towards a Total Reusability of
  Image Processing Algorithms).

* Thierry Géraud, Yoann Fabre, Alexandre Duret-Lutz, Dimitri
  Papadopoulos-Orfanos, and Jean-François Mangin.  Obtaining
  Genericity for Image Processing and Pattern Recognition Algorithms.
  In the Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Pattern
  Recognition (ICPR'2000), IEEE Computer Society, vol. 4, pages
  816-819, Barcelona, Spain, September 2000.

* Alexandre Duret-Lutz. Olena: a Component-Based Platform for Image
  Processing, mixing Generic, Generative and OO Programming. In the
  Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium on Generative and
  Component-Based Software Engineering (GCSE 2000), Young Researchers
  Workshop (published in "Net.ObjectDays2000"; ISBN 3-89683-932-2),
  pages 653-659, Erfurt, Germany, October 2000.

* Alexandre Duret-Lutz, Thierry Géraud, and Akim Demaille. Generic
  Design Patterns in C++. In the Proceedings of the 6th USENIX
  Conference on Object-Oriented Technologies and Systems (COOTS'2001),
  pages 189-202, San Antonio, Texas, USA, January-February 2001.

* Thierry Géraud, Yoann Fabre, and Alexandre Duret-Lutz. Applying
  Generic Programming to Image Processing. In the Proceedings of the
  IASTED International Conference on Applied Informatics (AI'2001) --
  Symposium Advances in Computer Applications, ACTA Press, pages
  577-581, Innsbruck, Austria, February 2001.

* Generic Implementation of Morphological Image Operators,
  Jérôme Darbon, Thierry Géraud, and Alexandre Duret-Lutz,
  submitted to International Symposium On Mathematical Morphology VI
  (ISMM 2002), April 3-5, 2002, Sydney, Australia.


You can download these papers and related materials from
http://www.lrde.epita.fr/publications/.