In this week's Pick, we deviate somewhat from our "standard" format to say goodbye to our friend, co-worker, and collaborator Bob Bemis. Bob has co-written the Pick of the Week blog with Brett and Jiro for the past few years, but he is, alas, leaving the MathWorks to travel the globe with his lovely wife. He will be missed.

In honor of Bob's contributions to this blog, Brett and Jiro would like to each select and feature one of Bob's many useful submissions to the MATLAB Central File Exchange. (His 25 submissions date back to 2002; over the course of 9 years, Bob has consistently been one of the most downloaded authors on the Exchange.)

To be quite honest, I (Brett) had thought that Bob's Thresholding Tool had been featured long ago, or I would have Picked it previously. It's a file that I use myself quite frequently, and that I typically show when I'm demonstrating the Image Processing capabilities of MATLAB. In a nutshell, Bob's GUI provides an easy interface for selecting a suitable level for thresholding an image. The three panels of thresh_tool show the original image, a histogram of the original image, and the segmentation of that image given the currently selected threshold value. The tool utilizes Brandon Kuczenski's vline, another File Exchange submission (and former POTW), enabling the user to simply drag a line through the histogram to select the threshold value. The axes on the upper right updates automatically to show the segmentation as one drags the line.

Safe travels, Bob, and thanks for all the fish! :)

As I (Jiro) was looking through Bob's entries, I realized that I could pretty much pick any of his entries and be certain that I could write something great about it. I mean, take a look at all the stars he has in the ratings column! But since I needed to pick one, I chose Animated GIF. This is a good follow up to my previous post, where I used the technique highlighted by Bob to create the animated GIF. Bob is always thinking of ways to enlighten users with MATLAB's capabilities, and this is just one of them. I will miss him a lot, but I know he will be MATLAB-ing from time to time during his new endeavor. Keep in touch, Bob!

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