Searching for patterns on the screen

[Claudio Grondi]

Jerry Hill wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I have a piece of code I could use some help optimizing.  What I'm
> attempting to do is periodically grab a screenshot, and search for 2D
> patterns of black pixels in it.  I don't care about any color other
> than black.  Here's some simple code that simulates my worst-case
> scenario, scanning the whole screen for a sequence that does not
> exist:
> 
> import ImageGrab  # From the PIL library
> 
> def removeColor(rgb):
>    r, g, b = rgb
>    return (r == 0 and g == 0 and b == 0)
> 
> BMP = ImageGrab.grab.getdata()
> x = map(removeColor, BMP)
> 
> The idea is to search for sequences of black pixels on a background
> that can change colors.  To that end, I transform the screengrab into
> a sequence of either black or nonblack pixels as I search them. Note
> that in my actual code, I use imap so I only transform pixels as I
> search them, and I'm using the KnuthMorrisPratt algorithm from
> http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/117214 to do
> the actual searching.
> 
>> From some testing using the timeit module:
> 
> map(None, BMP) takes about 0.6 seconds on a 1600x1200 screengrab.
> map(removeColor, BMP) takes about 1.5 seconds.
> 
> I'd love to speed things up, if possible.  It seems like what I'm
> doing would probably be a fairly well defined problem, but I don't
> know enough about the field to even know where to start my research,
> so even a list of keywords that would point me to discussion of
> similar topics would be welcome.
> 
> This is being done in Python 2.5c2 using PIL 1.1.5
> 
Use PIL for grabbing the screenshot and numarray for processing the 
image. See
http://groups.google.com.vc/group/comp.lang.python/browse_thread/thread/6207e7526fb6fdc6/a05646969d59102e
for some further helpful hints towards speeding things up.

Claudio Grondi