Color Extractor

While almost all of my JavaFX friends are somewhere in SF attending a small, unknown Java conference I have refined the code of the Color Extractor application (formerly known as HSV Adjuster). ;-)

Here is a screencast showing the application in action:

Here is a screenshot:

In short, the application now combines the input signal with the HSV mask you can create using the three sliders. The application writes this information into the alpha channel of the input image stream, resulting in pictures like above.

The neat thing is that the image stream is taken from your webcam, and thus it is an interactive way to explore the effects of different settings.

This solves also the greatest shortcoming of the HSV Adjuster application, which didn't yet combine the alpha information with the input image but only showed the alpha channel in black and white. The latter has its own aesthetic appeal, but I think the color extractor application better shows the original intend I had.

Implementation Notes:

The application is written in Scala, the GUI Frontend was done in JavaFX and the image processing works with OpenCV by using its Java bindings. OpenCV can split each color channel (RGB) and combine it with alpha channel information (see the alphaBlend method in the source code below).

The conversion of OpenCV Mat data to images which can be displayed by ImageView components is done by the toImage function - in contrast to earlier versions of my Webcam API layer I'm using the approach discussed here - this optimization speeds up the application considerably.

Source code of the application is available here. Below you can find the source of the main application for fast reference.

Guys, I wish you a nice time in SF and hope we'll see stunning new work for the JVM platform.

Nashorn Javascript Engine with JDK8 - Hello World

In the upcoming JDK8 release a new Javascript engine called Nashorn will be included. Together with a new command line program called "jjs" it is trivial to write applications in Javascript which in turn can utilize any JVM based library.

A hello world application could look like this:

java.lang.System.out.println("hello world");

This line should be put into a file called 'hello.js' and then you can start the Nashorn engine by issuing following command:

$JAVA_HOME/bin/jjs hello.js


Embedding javascript code in Scala applications is also easy by using the JSR223.


For a more detailed discussion on this topic you can read the Java Scripting Programmer's Guide or skim through this slides by Attila Szegedi. Maybe you stop by the nice blog post from Felix Bembrick how to combine Nashorns superpowers with JavaFX canvas to get an idea what can be possible.

Of course, there are other approaches to combine Scala and Javascript, but this is another story ...