{"id":242,"date":"2013-02-27T10:41:00","date_gmt":"2013-02-27T10:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.technet.microsoft.com\/inside_microsoft_research\/2013\/02\/27\/image-debugging-for-visual-studio\/"},"modified":"2016-07-20T07:32:00","modified_gmt":"2016-07-20T14:32:00","slug":"image-debugging-for-visual-studio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/blog\/image-debugging-for-visual-studio\/","title":{"rendered":"Image Debugging for Visual Studio"},"content":{"rendered":"

Posted by Rob Knies<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Image (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Setting an objective is often the first step to achieving it. Case in point: Image Watch (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Image Watch is a Visual Studio 2012<\/a> plug-in from the Interactive Visual Media (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> (IVM) group at Microsoft Research Redmond (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>. The tool enables anyone building image-processing applications to visualize images just as they would any other variable within the Visual Studio integrated development environment.<\/p>\n

“The tool—which works for Windows Phone (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, Windows Store (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, or desktop apps—began with a straightforward objective,” says Wolf Kienzle (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, a senior research software-design engineer with the IVM team.<\/p>\n

“I wanted to create a tool that puts all the pixels in your app at your fingertips, all the time,” Kienzle says. “The goal was to be able to see what image objects exist in your program at a given time and to visually inspect these images.”<\/p>\n

Image Watch, released just three months after Kienzle began work on it, is designed for those building computer-vision or image-processing applications. For example, the OpenCV (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> developer community might find Image Watch to be a huge boost to programming productivity. Within the IVM group, the recently released Blink (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> and Cliplets (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> apps were debugged extensively using Image Watch. One of the keys to its success is its integration into the Visual Studio environment, with which software developers are familiar.<\/p>\n

“In many ways”, Kienzle says, “Image Watch works just like Visual Studio’s built-in Watch window, the difference being that instead of displaying values as text, our Image Watch window renders bitmaps. I also wanted to have the image viewer support common debugging tasks, such as quick A\/B comparisons between images or visualizing individual channels.”<\/p>\n