ImageEn Watch: Detecting and Tracking Faces and Hands...

You often see Delphi threads where people wax lyrical about the components they cannot live without. And like everyone, I have my favorites; the DevExpress grids (though I use an older version of the grid before it got bloated), ElevateSoft database components and Indy, come to mind. But to be frank, if I had to, I believe i could replace any of them without significantly degrading my products.

On the other hand if I lost ImageEn, the wonderful suite of image display and editing components, I don't think i could hope to ever rebuild my applications to the same level of grandeur, and certainly not with components written natively in Delphi.

Some of the features I would struggle to find so well supported:

• Support for almost any image format you can think of, including Raw camera formats

• Display of images with as much control as you could ever want, including separate auto-shrink and auto-stretch properties, gradient or tiled backgrounds and most importantly transition and pan zoom effects

• There is a massive variety of transition effects (around 200) and most of them look fantastic

• All the editing functions you ever need including red-eye removal and lossless rotation and cropping

• Excellent print preview

And that's just off the top of my head. I really can't imagine developing an image application in Delphi without it.

ImageEn development was rather quiet last year and I was starting to fear the worst, but then in 2011 came a revamped web site, a well supported forum and a slew of new releases.

The latest release adds support for a new add-in, IEVision, which is about the coolest thing I have played with in Delphi for a while. My favorite feature is the ability to detect faces in a photo or track faces, hands, feet, etc. in a live video stream. It also supports OCR and image patching. You can download an EXE demo from their site at:

http://www.imageen.com/demos/index.html#IEVision


Obligatory Stolen Screenshots:

• Image Patching
  

• OCR