Feathering, growing, shrinking, closing and opening are the same number
read differently. With the signed distance from the boundary in hand,
dilation is the set where d >= -r, erosion where d >= +r, and a feather of
any shape is a function of d. So the field is computed once and the
controls are arithmetic on it.
The **field** is what reaches the GPU, not a finished alpha, and that is
the point: growing a mask or changing its falloff then costs a uniform
upload and no recomputation, which is what makes them live controls rather
than ones that stall on every drag. Only closing and opening rebuild,
because after the first threshold the shape has changed and the old
distances describe the old one.
Exact Euclidean, via Felzenszwalb's separable transform — not a chamfer
approximation, which leaves a mask visibly octagonal once grown more than
a few pixels. A test asserts the diagonal is √2 rather than 1 or 2.
It runs on the CPU, which ARCH §5.4 forbids for masks. The rule is about
brush lag — a stroke rasterised per frame — and this is a different
operation: once per mask edit, on input the model already produced here,
producing a field the GPU then samples for free. What it buys is exact
determinism, which matters because masks reach the sidecar as indices and a
field that varied by vendor would mean a mask meaning one thing on the
desktop and another on the phone.
The half-pixel in `signed_distance` is not a detail, and a test caught it.
Measuring to the nearest opposite pixel *centre* puts the smallest
magnitude at 1 either side, so the boundary is nowhere and **eroding by
less than a pixel removes nothing**. A control whose first notch does
nothing is a broken control. Half a pixel off each side puts the boundary
where it physically is, and eroding by 1 takes exactly the outermost ring.
Every falloff curve is 0.5 at the boundary by construction, asserted for
all five: changing the curve should change how the transition looks and
never where it sits.
Local masking needs to know where an image's regions are. The watershed
spike (S15 arm A) found the boundaries but had no idea what any of them
enclosed; its coarse levels were geometric accidents. This adds the other
half and the thing that joins them.
`core/dr-segment` is where region reasoning now lives — the hierarchy moves
out of `dr-gpu`, which keeps only the pixel passes that are genuinely
shaders. The new crate is device-free and, without its default features,
model-free too: 20 of its tests need neither an adapter nor 11 MB of
weights.
Arm B runs YOLO26n-seg through `ort`. D13 framed inference as a choice
between `ort`'s C++ runtime and the pure-Rust dependency policy; that was a
false choice. `ort`'s `alternative-backend` feature unlinks the C entirely
and `ort-tract` supplies the API from tract, which is pure Rust. Measured
before committing to it: zero unsupported operators, 420 ms for 640x640,
and correct masks on bus.jpg. No NDK problem to solve, so D13's largest
tolerated exception is not needed.
Arm C is `prior.rs`, and it ships because the two arms fail in opposite
directions. Instance membership re-weights the merge saddles, so region
pairs the model believes share an object merge early and pairs straddling
its edge merge late. No boundary moves — only the order in which they
dissolve — which is how the result stays pixel-accurate at every level
while its coarse levels become named things.
Two things the spec assumed that turned out to be false, both recorded in
models/LICENCE.md: there is no usable ADE20K-trained YOLO, so the shipped
vocabulary is COCO's 80 subjects and *stuff* like sky and foliage must come
from arm A; and tract cannot parse a dynamic-shape export, so the graph's
input is fixed and tiling is the only route to more semantic resolution.
Weights are AGPL-3.0, which GPLv3 §13 permits and which makes the combined
work effectively AGPL. Deliberate, not accidental. They live in Git LFS,
and a build script fails with an instruction rather than embedding a
pointer file when the clone lacks them.
dtourolle