[News] Visualisation tools: roadmap
Emmanuel Bertin
bertin@iap.fr
Tue, 03 Jun 2003 18:09:05 +0200
Dear AstroWISErs,
please find below our proposed roadmap for the AstroWISE image visualisation tool to be
developped by Frederic Magnard:
First milestone (proposed deadline: November 17, 2003):
* Investigate OpenGL-based approach (for both software and hardware supported implementations)
* Release a first fully operational prototype of the image visualisation tool including:
- a fast, POSIX-compliant, QT or Gnome-based, C/C++ display engine with
- smooth scrolling
- native support for true colour and palletized displays
- large (3x2^16 elements), non-linear floating-point RGB lookup-table to allow for
an extremely large dynamic range in intensity (160dB or more)
- adjustable RGB LUTs using B-splines
- compensation for monitor gamma, adjustable in the preferences with built-in calibration tool
- intelligent default flux scaling when loading images
- simultaneous handling of 10 frames or more
- ultra-fast blinking between frames (X11 backstore)
- optimized MEF and 3D FITS (data-cube) support.
- handling of very large images thanks to memory mapping
- flexible real-time magnifier
- zoom with binning or decimation options
- image flipping and rotation
- frame tiling
- pixel and world coordinate display
- configurable Postscript and PNG/JPEG/TIFF export function
- The display engine shall take advantage of SIMD features (MMX/SSE/3Dnow!/SSE2) and 64bit support
in modern processors to maximize efficiency.
Second milestone: (proposed deadline: November 2004):
* Second major release (besides regular updates)
- Overlay features with
- Handling of regions (define, load, sace)
- Coordinate grid overlay
- Geometric measurements (distance)
- Cut graphs
- Catalog overlay
- Support for local catalogs in ASCII format
- Automatic Name-matching (CDS?)
- Region-based Image queries (DSS, CFHT, HST,...)
- Source Catalog queries (GSC, USNO, SIMBAD,...)
- Alternate highlighting/selection either on image or on the source list.
- Interactive Image analysis
- Local image statistics.
- Gaussian fit to selected sources
Third milestone: (proposed deadline: November 2005):
* Investigate integration as a web-browser plugin, for remotely examining arbitrary parts of
large compressed images
Cheers,
Emmanuel.