History, Code, Distribution

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History, Code, Distribution

This programme was written by Irwin Scollar of the Unkelbach Valley Software Works, Remagen, Germany at the beginning of 2005 as a programming exercise to test a new image processing library. Version 1 used manually made distortion profiles and the profiles made for the early pre-2005 free version of PTLens by Tom Niemann.

RadCor was originally intented only for use with cheap digital cameras suspended from balloons, kites or ultra-light aircraft in the photography and subsequent rectification of aerial images from archaeological sites and excavations, where the risk of losing or damaging an expensive digital camera with a highly corrected lens is too great. It has since found wide use in other environments.

Version 2 which uses the new version of PTLens data was written in September 2006. The PTLens database which was free of charge before 2005 now requires a small payment to its author and the Ptlens.dat file must be unlocked with a special code. The programme however will work for older cameras or with user implemented profiles without a PTLens license.

The PTlens license may be obtained from the PTLens web site if you want to treat images from cameras and lenses calibrated after the beginning of 2006. The latest version of PTLens.dat should also be downloaded when obtaining the license and copied along with the license to the installation directory.

RadCor is available without charge via Internet download.

It was written in Borland's Delphi 7 and requires the Turbo Power Software SysTools and Orpheus libraries available from Source Forge

   http://sourceforge.net/users/tpsfadmin

and the VCL imaging tools available from Hicomponents at http://www.hicomponents.com all of which are free of charge. The central algorithm used for radial and chromatic correction is derived from that used in the Hicomponents suite modified for increased speed and for support of 48 bit (3 x 16 bit) RGB files as well as for interpolation.

RadCor uses David Coffin's DCRAW library for reading RAW image files and and the ImageMagik library for reading or writing a variety of files with rarely required formats. See:

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dcraw and

   http://www.imagemagick.org.

You may make and distribute unaltered copies of the RadCor executable and it's accompanying support files in any way you wish.

Note:

The source code for the programme is available on request after authorization from Thomas Niemann has been received and confirmed.