Filtering the image background

It's beginning to seem, that my planned timetable for this summer project is way off. Luckily it seems, that I've overestimated the time I need instead of underestimating. So what does this mean exactly? Well, now it's been a full two weeks since I started the project but I had planned five weeks for doing what I've done up to this point. Also, I've planned two weeks for creating renderer support for BackgroundImage and BackgroundAlpha input images. Well, it seems that support for BackgroundImage exists already, it just needed these changes I committed today to enable it.

Well then, about this commit today: support for in-parameter in filter primitives. This means, that now we aren't limited to filtering only the image itself and building linear filter chains. The background image can be taken into account when filtering and building complex filters should be possible too.

There are lots of possibilities that this enables. Next picture shows one of them: frost glass effect. Here I've got an ordinary gaussian blur, but instead of applying it to the object itself, I apply it to the background image. The object itself disappears, all we see is that a square area of the image is blurred.

This support for different input images isn't without problems, though. One really annoying one is with blend filter: it sometimes doesn't use the specified blending mode, but seems to apply normal alpha blending. I don't know yet, if this is a bug in input images support, in blend filter or even in some seemingly unrelated part of code.

To help debugging this, I think I'll reorder my timetable and implement feOffset filter next. This will allow me to use some example images W3C has published and compare renderings from Inkscape to them.