Icon Image Recognition utility to "decode" standard icons in image files

[wildcatherder]

The difficulty with documentation and assistance provided by experts and veterans, especially on forums, is that the code supplied is poorly annotated, e.g. in examples posted, VI name labels are usually not turned on.

Because of the thousands of VIs supplied by National Instruments, I doubt anyone can identify them all at a glance.

It would be a great service to new users or users expanding into new functions to be able to:

          Screen capture an icon (or group of icons, if possible) or provide a PNG or JPG file and pass the file to a utility which would identify the matching VI by name or show close matches.

Nothing is more maddening than seeing a solution to one's problem without being able to identify the VIs used.  

[dthor]

If people started using the VI Snippets for posting solutions (as they should be...), then this suggestion isn't required. But I do agree, it's quite annoying to see the solution and have to search through the entire VI pallet trying to match the icon.

[wildcatherder]

Even the snippets are not much help, if you do not have a compatible version of VI.

[RavensFan]

The code capture tool is actually better to use than the built-in LabVIEW snippet function.  It has the abillity to create a snippet that can be inserted into an older version of LabVIEW than the version you are actually doing a capture in.  Basically, a built in "Save As Previous Version".

[wildcatherder]

That sounded like a very useful utility.  So, I went through Source Forge to the author's site which describes it:

Name: Code Capture Tool 2.1.4 - LV7.0 Submitter: Ton Plomp Submitted: 03 Jul 2009 File Updated: 02 Dec 2010 Category: LabVIEW IDEVersion: 2.1.4 LabVIEW Version: 7.0 License Type: BSD (Most common) The Code Capture tool allows you easily create screenshots of you LabVIEW code for use in documentation, web-sites, wikis, emails. This tool provides an API for creating images of LabVIEW code as well a GUI for easy capturing and use of code. Further info is provided in the help-screen (F1) of the program. For the latest version visit the Code Repository For the latest version of the source code, visit SourceForge For more info, visit the LabVIEW wiki with the documenation.
A series of videos is available on screencast: Code Capture Tool

This is handy but doesn't deal with legacy images still out there and submissions by "newbies" unfamiliar with snippets and other code capture.  If NI really wants people to be able to learn and use the product, the image recognition utility I propose would be one of the biggest contributions to making existing forum examples accessible to all.

[JackDunaway]

While it would be straightforward developing a tool that supports identification of common G primitives from a bitmapped image (such as PNG), one gotcha arises with a diagram saved as JPG (a common mistake, because PNG's provide lossless compression and typically smaller filesizes for LV BD images). I've tagged this with "addon_candidate" since it might appeal to a community member up for the challenge of creating such a tool (with some clever heuristics and scripting and use of the Get Image Invoke Node).

[wildcatherder]

Even it restricted to PNG, that would be great.  Thanks for the "addon_candidate" tag.

[Darren]

Any idea that has received less than 3 kudos within 3 years after posting will be automatically declined.