Measuring PowerPoint Slide Overcrowding - c#

I want to measure the amount of empty space on a slide (in order to overcome slide overcrowding) in a PowerPoint Add-In. Having access to each shape on a slide, I was planning to calculate the amount of area each shape takes and then subtract it from the total area available. I was wondering if this is the most efficient method, or if could use something else, eg. using image processing techniques.

Unless you know that the slide background will always be plain/solid color, I don't think image processing techniques would help, and would probably necessitate exporting each slide as an image, which'd be more time consuming that stepping through the shapes on each slide.
Summing the area occupied by each shape and comparing it to the overall slide size would be a good rough answer. To do a better job, you'd want to account for overlapping shapes; two squares, one atop the other, would only occupy the area of one of them, assuming they're the same size. You may also want to consider the shapes on each slide's layout, and you'd want to test placeholder shapes to see if they're empty or not; they occupy space in editing views, but if empty, won't appear in printouts or slide shows.

Related

Split an image up into quadrants or splice image into multiple?

So I have one image that on paper they were drawing lines/circles on particular areas of the image that they had designated certain sides as area 1-4, then 5-6 in the center and then a few specific spots as area 7. They wanted to make this digital. So I put the image on a win form, made it so they can create lines and circles (eventually I'll have it so the lines are measured and stored in an array) However along with storing that I need to store what number area the line/circle was created in for tracking purpose so they can look back later to see where the majority of, in this case flaws, are being circled on the image. (The image represents a real machine part). So right now I'm stuck trying to figure out how to designate certain areas of this image as area 1-4, 5,6 (and multiple 7's).
Is it better to split each area up into its own photo and piece them together like a puzzle? Or is there a better way in code to do this leaving 1 image to work with?

SciChart Realtime zoom with minimum axis range

I have a FIFO Real Time chart (pretty much taken from their published Example) of a SciChart graph. As it renders, it starts out completely zoomed in very close and as the line is drawn, it zooms out to accommodate the full size of the line.
<s:SciChartSurface.XAxis>
<s:NumericAxis x:Name="axisX" MinHeight="50" AutoRange="Always" AxisTitle="{Binding Path=XAxisTitle}" DrawMinorGridLines="False" DrawMinorTicks="False" TextFormatting="0.##">
<s:NumericAxis.GrowBy>
<s:DoubleRange Max="0.1" Min="0.1" />
</s:NumericAxis.GrowBy>
</s:NumericAxis>
</s:SciChartSurface.XAxis>
However, what I would like is for it to begin zoomed out by a certain amount already - e.g. the X axis would already be displaying from (for example) 0 - 10 and as the line is drawn it proceeds across the screen, only zooming if the line happens to get bigger than the space provided.
I've tried setting the VisibleRangeLimit, but while this does allow me to define the range of the chart area, the zoom doesn't kick in when the curve gets too big (so it literally goes "off the chart")
How can this be accomplished?
The reason for this is the Fifo Example in sciChart WPF uses XAxis AutoRange set to Always to scale the axis to fit the data. When the example starts, even if the Fifo buffer has a capacity of 10,000 points, it has no data in it, hence the axis is scaled small to accommodate the data.
There are two ways around this:
Is to pre-fill your FIFO DataSeries with X=xValue, Y=double.NaN. Given enough values the chart will think it has to draw all these points so the XAxis will scale accordingly
Is to take control of XAxis.VisibleRange yourself (do not use AutoRange). In this case, you need to set XAxis.VisibleRange to a window size to accommodate N points, and as you update data, update the window.
The FAQ 'How to create a StripChart in SciChart' demonstrates technique (2), how to update the visible-range of the XAxis to achieve scrolling behaviour.
Disclosure, I am the tech lead of the SciChart WPF Team

WPF Create Area Consumption Calculator

I have a project where I need to calculate how many "widgets" i can remove from an area defined by the user.
for example, if i have a piece of paper... 13in x 23in. How many business cards I print when the business card dimensions are 5in x 3in.
I need something like this...
http://www.copel.com.py/calculadora-de-corte.html
But the best I can do is use a WrapPanel, which does a good job, but if I need to rotate an object, it leaves me with blank space. meaning that wrap panel works by rows, and each row takes the space of the largest object. leaving wastage around the smaller ones.
How do you suggest I attack this problem?
C#, WPF, XAML.!

Algorithm to detect if a pixel is within a boundary

We're currently creating a simple application for image manipulation in Silverlight, and we've hit a bit of a snag. We want users to be able to select an area of an image (either by drawing a freehand line around their chosen area or by creating a polygon around it), and then be able to apply effects to the pixels within that selection.
Creating a selection of images is easy enough, but we want a really fast algorithm for deciding which pixels should be manipulated (ie. something to detect which pixels are within the user's selection).
We've thought of three possibilities so far, but we're sure that there must be a really efficient and quick way of doing this that's better than these.
1. Pixel by pixel.
We just go through every pixel in an image and check whether it's within the user selection. Obviously this is far too slow!
2. Using a Line Crossing Algorithim.
The type of thing seen here.
3. Flood Fill.
Select the pixels along the path of the selection and then perform a flood fill within that selection. This might work fine.
This must a problem that's commonly solved, so we're guessing there's a ton more solutions that we've not even thought of.
What would you recommend?
Flood fill algorithm is a good choice.
Take a look at this implementation:
Queue-Linear Flood Fill: A Fast Flood Fill Algorithm
You should be able to use your polygon to create a clipping path. The mini-language for describing polygons for Silverlight is quiet well documented.
Alter the pixels on a copy of your image (all pixels is usually easy to modify than some pixels), then use the clipping path to render only the desired area of the changes back to the original image (probably using an extra buffer bitmap for the result).
Hope this helps. Just throwing the ideas out and see if any stick :)

How to detect image orientation (text)

My program is working with fax documents stored as separate bitmaps
I wonder if there is a way to detect automatically page orientation (vertical or horizontal) to show image preview for user in right order (meant rotate if neccesary)
Any advices much appreciated!
EDIT: Clarification:
When Faxmachine receives multi-page document it saves each page as separate TIFF file.
My app has built-in viewer displaying those files. All files are scaled to A4 format and saved in TIFF (so there is no change to detect orientation by height/width parameters)
My viewer displays images in portrait mode by default
What I'd like to do is automagically detect situation when org document was printed in landscape mode (eg wide Excel tables) then I'd like to show rotated preview for end user to speed up preview process
Obviously there are 4 possible fax orientation portrait / landscape x 2 kinds of rotations.
I'm even interested simplified solution detecting when org doc was landscape or portrait (I've noticed most of landscape docs needs to be rotated clockwise)
EDIT2: Idea
I think it might be some idea:
If I could draw horizontal and vertical lines and check if line doesn't cut any (black) point. Then we can compare what are more type of lines (horizontal or vertical) and his decides about page orientation.
What do you think ?
You could perform a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to convert your spatial image to a frequency/angle representation. Then find the angle with the most prominent frequency. It sounds complicated but it's not that hard, it's pretty efficient, and in effect it tests every possible angle at once, instead of being a hard-coded hack that only works for specific angles. Search for a sample implementation with search terms like Numerical Recipes and FFT.
You'd need OCR for that. Rolling your own OCR would be a bit difficult, but there might be library or something out there worth looking into? Also, even with good OCR, it's not a 100% reliable solution.
I wonder if there are some properties of text you could use to help you do this.
For instance based on a quick glance, there are far more vertical lines in text (l,j,k,m,n etc) than horizontal ones so maybe you could start with this.
But even detecting these isn't straightforward, you'd need to use some sort of filter like a Sobel or Prewitt. They both have horizontal and vertical versions, see here for more info.
Of course the vertical/horizontal lines of an excel spreadsheet would be the strongest edges so you'd have to ignore these and look only at the text.
Alternative: Can you not just give the user an easy way to rotate the images, like the arrows in Windows Picture viewer or just show 4 thumbnail previews they can click on. You might need to cache the 4 versions (if you are rotating) so it's quick, but only if speed turns out to be an issue?
Here's a paper entitled "Combined Script and Page Orientation Estimation using
the Tesseract OCR engine" [pdf]
I haven't been able to find an implementation of their work, but the approach looks good to me:
The basic idea behind the proposed approach is simple.
A shape classifier is trained on characters (classes) from all the scripts of interest. At run-time, the classifier is run independently on each connected component (CC) in the image and the process is repeated after rotating each CC into three other candidate orientations (90°, 180° and 270° from the input orientation).
The algorithm keeps track of the estimated number of characters in each script for a given orientation, and the accumulated classifier confidence score across all candidate orientations. The estimate of page orientation is chosen as the one with the highest cumulative confidence score, and the estimate of script is chosen as the one with the highest number of characters in that script for the best orientation estimate.

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