pamtohdiff(1) - Man pages

Pamtohdiff User Manual(1) General Commands Manual Pamtohdiff User Manual(1)

NAME
pamtohdiff - convert PAM image to horizontal difference image

SYNOPSIS
pamtohdiff [pamfile] [-verbose]

DESCRIPTION
This program is part of Netpbm(1).

pamtohdiff takes a PAM (or PNM) image as input and produces a horizontal
difference image version of it as output. A horizontal difference image
is one where the samples in each row indicate the difference between the
sample value in the corresponding sample of the input image and the sam-
ple directly above it (in the previous row) in the input image. The
horizontal difference image has the property that if a row of the origi-
nal image is identical to the row above it over a long extent, the cor-
responding row in the horizontal difference image will contain all ze-
roes. That makes it compress better than the original image.

Because the horizontal difference samples can be positive or negative,
but PAM samples are unsigned integers, the samples in the horizontal
difference image PAM are defined to be the difference modulus the range
of the input (maxval + 1). This doesn't lose any information, as it
might seem, because: of the two differences that could result in the
same pamtohdiff output value (e.g. if maxval is 99, +20 and -80 would
both result in "20" in the output), only one is possible in context and
the other would result, when reconstructing the original image, in a
value less than 0 or greater than maxval.

Before the modulus operation, the values pamtohdiff computes are also
biased by half the maxval. This is to make the results easier to in-
spect visually. Because of the bias, you can display the pamtohdiff
output as if it were a PNM image. As long as none of your differences
are more than half the maxval, large negative differences show up as
dark spots, smaller negative differences are lighter, zero differences
are medium intensity, and positive differences are light. If you want
this to work even for images that have differences that exceed half the
maxval, just use ppmdim 50 on the original image. To avoid losing in-
formation, though, do a pamdepth to double the maxval first.

Note that because of the transfer function just described, a difference
of zero, which is most common, is represented by a PAM sample value in
the output of one half the maxval.

The output PAM has a tuple type of "hdiff".

You can use hdifftopam to recover the original image from a horizontal
difference image PAM.

OPTIONS
In addition to the options common to all programs based on libnetpbm
(most notably -quiet, see ]8;;index.html#commonoptions\ Common Options]8;;\ ), pamtohdiff recognizes the
following command line option:

-verbose
Currently no effect. This may change in future versions.