Easy way to plot and display arrays? - c

First post here. Using C in Visual Studio 2008. Can work with VS 2005 if necessary.
How do I display numerical data in arrays as in a spreadsheet?
How do I plot numerical data in arrays?
These seem to be simple questions. But I cannot find solutions. So far, I would print the data to a file, import into Excel and view/plot. However, with this code there are too many arrays--so the print/import/plot is tiring.
Some constraints.
I do not want to write 20+ lines of code to do the above. MATFOR or Array Visualizer let you do the plotting with a one line function call.
They cannot display the data in a convenient format. I would like to display the data and the plot in one or two windows so that they are visible simultaneously.
This is a win32 console application---all the code is portable.
Will be using these during debugging.
Free or paid.
While I am looking for something specific, the requirements are substantially the same for any one doing numerical work with arrays and matrices--displaying data and plot simultaneously.
I am hoping that a such a tool has been written and is available.
I am also open to a solution that outputs the array data to an Excel sheet (can keep Excel open) and if it can also plot that can be great but I can live without plotting.
PS: I need this only when debugging the code.

I use ArrayDebugView which is a plug-in you install in Visual studio and draws graphs out of arrays while you are debugging your application. It works as a visual way of variable watch in debug mode. You don't need to write a line of code.

I can't think of any library that would enable what you want in a console app in less than 20 lines of code. My suggestion would be instead to script the plotting-step using MATLAB og GNU Octave to do the actual plotting.

In order to display numerical data in array, you should add the pointer to the first data element you want to observe, into the watch --- if you want to observe the array from the beginning, it would just be the array name, which is the pointer to the first element. In order to view more then one element, you add a "," after the pointer, followed by the number of element you want to observe.
For example, in order to observe the elements of float farray[100];, you should add to the watch farray,100.
In order to plot, you can copy-paste from the watch to your plotting software (i.e. excel), but it is not very convenient as you cannot copy the data column alone, but the columns to the left and right as well, so it involves extra manual editing.

I use GNUPlot (http://www.gnuplot.info/) to display my performance/speedup measurements.
I print my numbers to stdout and wrote a bash script that combines these numbers and calls gnuplot for rendering.

I made a simple plotting program for that purpose. There is only a textbox where I paste the data and a chart where it's drawn.
The data needs to be in either form:
with an automatic X (increment by 1 for each value): seriesName value
for both X and Y specified: seriesName xvalue yvalue
Most of the time I used to plot data from tracepoints.
I copy/paste the whole output window of VS, the plotting program ignores anything that doesn't follow these 2 forms (so I don't have to cleanup the string and put it in excel and all).
It does line, point, colum, area charts and save image, copy to clipboard.
MiniPlot

There are several ways to do this but this will require writing some code. Visualizing data is generally easy and straight forward but visualizing data exactly the way you want them to look will require some additional code and work.
There are several options to visualize data:
A combination of BASH and GNUPLOT
Use MATLAB or OCTAVE for all your calculations and visualization
Use PYTHON and SciPy and matlibplot libraries.
Gnuplot is a great tool to plot data but it is cumbersome to use. It looks fabulous if you invest time to get the plots right and combines excellent with LaTeX and has a good fit implementation for arbitrary functions. Visit http://gnuplot-tricks.blogspot.ch/ great site to learn all about gnuplot.
Numerical programs such as MATLAB and it's open source equivalent OCTAVE are great because they are fast implementation languages for numerical programs and have extensive additional libraries especially MATLAB. For high load numerical computing it is really slow and the plot library is only good for basic plotting needs.
Using PYTHON and its scientific programing libraries (SciPy and matlibplot) are a great combination. This allows excellent plot which are not as cryptic as gnuplot to plrogram and it is more flexible than MATLAB in plotting. Additionally it gives you a environment for numerical programing like MATLAB.

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Meshroom: how to access the final camera parameters?

I am trying to write a script which loads the camera parameters from Meshroom and imports them into a CAD program. My first understanding was that these parameters (position, rotation matrix, focal length etc.) are contained in the JSON-file cameras.sfm in the StructureFromMotion-subdirectory.
After importing these parameters into Rhino3D and comparing the resulting views onto the 3D-mesh with the undistorted photographs in the PrepareDenseScene-directory, I find surprising large discrepancies. The mesh which was the result of the run was good, so I think that the deviation is because of the parameters in cameras.sfm being not the final ones. This assumption is also supported by the fact that the file only contains the focal length as read from the input images' EXIF information and no refined values. So my question is:
How can I access the final camera parameters from the output of Meshroom?
Knowing this would help me a lot for re-building a photogrammetry/CAD pipeline I had previously implemented for VisualSFM + CMPMVS.
Many thanks!
EDIT: As this is my first post, I am not able to create a new tag for Meshroom. Perhaps this could be added by someone else? Thanks!

Simple Multi-Blob Detection of a Binary Image?

If there is a given 2d array of an image, where threshold has been done and now is in binary information.
Is there any particular way to process this image to that I get multiple blob's coordinates on the image?
I can't use openCV because this process needs to run simultaneously on 10+ simulated robots on a custom simulator in C.
I need the blobs xy coordinates, but first I need to find those multiple blobs first.
Simplest criteria of pixel group size should be enough. But I don't have any clue how to start the coding.
PS: Single blob should be no problem. Problem is multiple blobs.
Just a head start ?
Have a look at QuickBlob which is a small, standalone C library that sounds perfectly suited for your needs.
QuickBlob comes with a small command-line tool (csv-blobs) that outputs the position and size of each blob found within the input image:
./csv-blobs white image.png
X,Y,size,color
28.37,10.90,41,white
51.64,10.36,42,white
...
Here's an example (output image is produced thanks to the show-blobs.py tiny Python utility that comes with QuickBlob):
You can go through the binary image labeling the connected parts with an algorithm like the following:
Create a 2D array of ints, labelArray, that will hold the labels of the connected regions and initiate it to all zeros.
Iterate over each binary pixel, p, row by row
A. If p is true and the corresponding value for this position in the labelArray is 0 (unlabeled), assign it to a new label and do a breadth-first search that will add all surrounding binary pixels that are also true to that same label.
The only issue now is if you have multiple blobs that are touching each other. Because you know the size of the blobs, you should be able to figure out how many blobs are in a given connected region. This is the tricky part. You can try doing a k-means clustering at this point. You can also try other methods like using binary dilation.
I know that I am very late to the party, but I am just adding this for the benefipeople who are researching this problem.
Here is a nice description that might fit your needs.
http://www.mcs.csueastbay.edu/~grewe/CS6825/Mat/BinaryImageProcessing/BlobDetection.htm

Is there a C lib to find peaks in noisy data equivalent to findPeaks.m

i have a noisy set of data and want to find the peaks in it. There is a matlab function for this exact task which includes smoothing of the data. I is called findpeaks.m
Now as im working in C i would either would have to code this by myself or use some functions which im not aware of. I hope you can tell me if they exist and where i can find them, as this is a very common problem.
To be clear what im searching of: a function to first smooth my data and then calculate the peaks, both preferably with some parameters for smoothing method, peak width etc.
Thanks!

best method of turning millions of x,y,z positions of particles into visualisation

I'm interested in different algorithms people use to visualise millions of particles in a box. I know you can use Cloud-In-Cell, adaptive mesh, Kernel smoothing, nearest grid point methods etc to reduce the load in memory but there is very little documentation on how to do these things online.
i.e. I have array with:
x,y,z
1,2,3
4,5,6
6,7,8
xi,yi,zi
for i = 100 million for example. I don't want a package like Mayavi/Paraview to do it, I want to code this myself then load the decomposed matrix into Mayavi (rather than on-the-fly rendering) My poor 8Gb Macbook explodes if I try and use the particle positions. Any tutorials would be appreciated.
Analysing and creating visualisations for complex multi-dimensional data is complex. The best visualisation almost always depends on what the data is, and what relationships exists within the data. Of course, you are probably wanting to create visualisation of the data to show and explore relationships. Ultimately, this comes down to trying different posibilities.
My advice is to think about the data, and try to find sensible ways to slice up the dimensions. 3D plots, like surface plots or voxel renderings may be what you want. Personally, I prefer trying to find 2D representations, because they are easier to understand and to communicate to other people. Contour plots are great because they show 3D information in a 2D form. You can show a sequence of contour plots side by side, or in a timelapse to add a fourth dimension. There are also creative ways to use colour to add dimensions, while keeping the visualisation comprehensible -- which is the most important thing.
I see you want to write the code yourself. I understand that. Doing so will take a non-trivial effort, and afterwards, you might not have an effective visualisation. My advice is this: use a tool to help you prototype visualisations first! I've used gnuplot with some success, although I'm sure there are other options.
Once you have a good handle on the data, and how to communicate what it means, then you will be well positioned to code a good visualisation.
UPDATE
I'll offer a suggestion for the data you have described. It sounds as though you want/need a point density map. These are popular in geographical information systems, but have other uses. I haven't used one before, but the basic idea is to use a function to enstimate the density in a 3D space. The density becomes the fourth dimension. Something relatively simple, like the equation below, may be good enough.
The point density map might be easier to slice, summarise and render than the raw particle data.
The data I have analysed has been of a different nature, so I have not used this particular method before. Hopefully it proves helpful.
PS. I've just seen your comment below, and I'm not sure that this information will help you with that. However, I am posting my update anyway, just in case it is useful information.

drawing graphs in ubuntu

I have a C code that collects data and places them in a 2-D array. I would like to plot this data on an x-y graph (mathematics) automatically i.e. pass the data as parameters in a command line and get a graph
Are there any suggestions for how to do so?
gnuplot is a good one to look at assume you mean x-y charts, if you want actual graphs then look at dot
gnuplot will do what you need. If you want to process the data before, you might want to try octave, which aims to be a matlab equivalen (still uses gnuplot as a frontend for graphing).
If you want even more control, you could write a script in python and use matplotlib.

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