I’m feeling pretty happy with myself right about now. I was able to port a pretty tricky function from C# to VB.Net. Now you might ask why I would do something like that? Well simply I did it because I wanted to and mostly to see if I could figure it out. Let me tell you at first it wasn’t easy. Then it just dawned on me (actually just as I was getting ready for bed it dawned on me). This morning I finished it up and what do you know it worked.
The code is used to render edge detection on an image. Kind of like embossing using Photoshop or other image handlers. I’m going to use it for picture analysis looking for possible duplicate images where the image may actually be close to but not exactly the same image. For example there are two images and one has a higher resolution than the other, but they are pretty much the exact same picture. A simple MD5 fingerprint won’t identify them as identical because binary wise they really aren’t so we have to go the route of checking the pixels. Then the problem arises that you need to think of what sort of threshold than you need to determine if two pixels are within the same visual range, which is not so fun. Turning them grayscale doesn’t really help either because there would be fewer differences to find. SO what I want to do is run this edge detection and then have the pixels compared. Since basically the only parts of the image now to have a color are the edges. We’ll see how it works out 
I’ve posted the code at GalahTech in the Desktop Application Development Board if you want to use it.
