Spot: A Linear-Operator Toolbox

Ewout van den Berg and Michael P Friedlander

Contents

Linear operators are at the core of many of the most basic algorithms for signal and image processing. Matlab's high-level, matrix-based language allows us to naturally express many of the underlying matrix operations (e.g., computation of matrix-vector products and manipulation of matrices) and is thus a powerful platform on which to develop concrete implementations of these algorithms. Many of the most useful operators, however, do not lend themselves to the explicit matrix representations that Matlab provides. The aim of the Spot Toolbox is to bring the expressiveness of Matlab's built-in matrix notation to problems for which explicit matrices are not practical.

Please visit the Spot website to download the latest version of the toolbox.

Installation

The Spot toolbox requires Matlab version R2008a or later. In particular, Spot makes extensive use of the "new" object-oriented features (defined by the "classdef" keyword) that were introduced in the first quarter of 2008 later. It's been extensively tested against R2009a and R2009b. Please make sure to email one of the authors if you notice some incompatibility.

Spot is prepackaged with all of its required dependencies, and the core functionality will work out-of-the-box. The first step is to add the "spotbox" directory to your Matlab path:

addpath /path/to/spotbox/directory

See the MATLAB documentation for setting the search path.

Getting Started

Copyright 2008-2009 Ewout van den Berg and Michael P. Friedlander