Load Image Color

[guy]

Hello, thanks Marco for your first answer about this topic.

Can you advice me on how implement a function to load color image and more preciously to manage Basic Color Image Box using DCMTK ?
I shall do this myself so that my Application can send Basic Color Image Box to a printer.

I know I have posted a topic like this one on another forum but if you can put the light me on this problem, it should be greater.

[Marco Eichelberg]

Basic Color Image Box as such is pretty trivial - the N-SET command (which is the only primitive supported for this SOP class) looks quite similar to that of the Basic Grayscale Image Box, the difference being that you send an 8 Bit/Sample RGB image instead of a 8 or 12 Bit/Pixel monochrome image.

As I pointed out in my posting in comp.protocols.dicom, however, the problem is that the complete dcmpstat module is focused on Grayscale Softcopy Presentation States, and these simply cannot be extended for color images, i.e. you would have to change the underlying architecture which is not trivial, in particular since there is no standard for a Color Presentation State yet.

I should probably mention that there is another, pragmatic reason why we don't and will not support color in module dcmpstat: We have the "commercial" DCMPRINT package (see http://dicom.offis.de/dcmprint) which supports color. Sales of this package help to fund the maintenance of the base DCMTK.

[guy]

Ok, I have well understood what you said, but I don't think we will use a presentation state for this file.

In fact, as I said earlier, my society gets dicom file from acquisition modality (scanner...), and makes some transformations on the image (grayscale or color), and my job is to convert these modified images to secondary captures (monochrome 2 or true color) so that we can transmit them to a printer.

But we want to transmit only the image it appears on the screen and I think Prensentation State will be look later. So, Have I just not to create a new class like Basic grascale image box (i don't think there is a specific class in DCMTK as i have seen it for Basic Film Box, so please tell me the file or the class it is linking) ? And after that modify loadimage function to allow the loading of color image ?

I don't really understand the interest of Presentation State in my case because we only want to transmit image like it appears on the screen to the printer.

Thanks!

[Marco Eichelberg]

You have probably noticed that the Print SCU in module dcmpstat handles print jobs in two steps. First, there is a routine that creates a set of Stored Print objects (Stored Print plus Hardcopy Grayscale Image Storage), available as command line tool "dcmpsprt"; then there is a print client that just "spools" the content of these objects to the printer (dcmprscu). You need to adapt both. Adding color support to the spooler component should be pretty straightforward, but I am not so sure about the library that writes the Stored Print objects, because this is tightly coupled with the presentation state routines. Might even be easier to re-write that from scratch.