# Looking around the File Exchange

Today I looked around the File Exchange for recent image processing submissions or updates. (You can do this yourself by searching using the tag image processing.) Here are a few things that caught my eye.

getTimeStamp, by Christopher MacMinn, is an example of someone using the recently introduced linking between the File Exchange and GitHub. This is a straightforward function that illustrates how to use imfinfo to read useful metadata from a file. In particular, it shows how to extract the information that digital cameras stick into image files these days.

The critical part of the code looks something like this (simplified a bit):

info = imfinfo(filename);
if isfield(info,'DigitalCamera')
% There is digital camera information in the file.
% Get the time the picture was taken (as a string).
str = info.DigitalCamera.DateTimeOriginal;
end

If you have data that originally came from ImageJ, you might find Dylan Muir's ReadImageJROI function to be useful. Dylan originally submitted this in 2011, and he recently updated it to fix a couple of issues. The file is regularly downloaded and has received several good ratings.

PIVlab is an impressive-looking application for partical image velocimetry created by William Thielicke. This contribution gets a LOT of traffic and has very high ratings. William has updated it regularly, and he has been responsive in the comment thread.

Sometimes the author of a research paper will submit the MATLAB implementation of the paper's method to the File Exchange. That appears to be the case with An improved computer vision method for white blood cells detection (using differential evolution) by Erik. I'm guessing that Erik is Erik Cuevas, the lead author of the paper quoted in the submission's description.