Image simplification and interpretation modules

[Joshua Eric Turcotte]

Hello all; this is a first time post for me as I've led a very sheltered perl life in a fairly closed sourced organization. This has hampered my perl skills and so I'm striking out a bit and operating out of my particular box. And one thing I must do is familiarize myself and become comfortable with contributing to and assisting on the CPAN. (I'm also going to soon be giving a presentation on my experience with this at a local perl mongers meetup, so I must get off my butt.)

Introductions aside, I have a couple scripts bent upon first simplifying images passed to it (think large blobs as would be typical on a color coded map image that need their edges simplified) and another that (attempts to) scan the simplified image and identify each unique shape, turning them essentially into consistent vectors (think, for example, image maps for HTML or other purposes.)

First question, then, is... am I duplicating the wheel here? Any pointers as to where I might find similar work?

if not... second question is, is there a namespace where these would be appropriate submissions?

third? what should I be asking that I'm not?

Thanks all...

~joshua eric turcotte (JET on pause.)