| Today's IDL Lesson [message #61926] |
Thu, 14 August 2008 12:05  |
David Fanning
Messages: 11724
Registered: August 2001
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Senior Member |
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Folks,
A couple of weeks ago I was give some IDL code to,
essentially, find blobs in a large image, do some
processing on them, and return a result image. The
images we want to work on are on the order of
8800 by 6800, pretty big.
Naturally, the code contained FOR loops coming out
the wazzoo and it was VERY slow. I don't know *how*
slow because I turned the computer off when I noticed
smoke coming out the back and I couldn't immediately
locate the damn fire extinguisher.
Because lousy code doesn't necessarily prevent you
from writing scientific papers about your algorithm,
I read the paper to get the gist and decided their
algorithm was overly complicated and that I could do
it a lot more simply (and in WAY fewer loops).
So I code it up, using a much smaller image subset,
and it was quicker than snot. When I thought I had
all the kinks worked out of it, I decided to give'er
a try on the larger images. It took about 48 minutes
to run. Humm. Odd.
But I couldn't immediately see where the problem was.
I decided to play tennis instead of work on it anymore. :-)
This morning I ran the PROFILER on the code, and saw it
was spending most of its time in the WHERE function.
I was using the WHERE to locate the indices of blobs I
wanted to work with from the LABEL_REGION image. A couple
of quick tests showed that as that as that image gets larger,
the search time of WHERE goes up exponentially.
"Humm, I wish LABEL_REGION just returned the indices like the
HISTOGRAM function does," I thought.
What!? After 20 years of working with IDL it finally sunk
in. What I need is a HISTOGRAM!!!!
Here is the bottom line. My program, which took 48 minutes
to run yesterday, takes 10 *seconds* to run today.
Sometimes you just gotta love IDL! :-)
Cheers,
David
--
David Fanning, Ph.D.
Fanning Software Consulting, Inc.
Coyote's Guide to IDL Programming (www.dfanning.com)
Sepore ma de ni thui. ("Perhaps thou speakest truth.")
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