A visual programming interface for an image processing environment

The paper presents a visual programming interface for an image processing environment improving traditional interfaces by combining the user-friedliness of the menu & dialogue approach with programming capabilities. The interface gives a layman the opportunity to develop powerful image processing applications in a two-dimensional, data flow metaphor. This metaphor provides a better insight into the structure of an application than a traditional interface. The visual programming interface was developed in the principle of dialogue independence (Hartson and Hix, 1989). The communication between the user interface components and the computational components is well defined without jeopardizing the expressive power of the user interface. This allows for the independent development of image processing functions and user interface aspects. The integration of new functions into the environment is trivial.