XITE

X-based Image processing Tools and Environment
Free Software for Image Processing

Image Processing Laboratory
Department of Informatics
University of Oslo
Norway


Overview

This UNIX software consists of X11-based display programs with image widget and graphical user interface, more than 200 programs for image processing, 600 subroutines for image processing and widget handling, and 60 subroutines for image format handling, on-line documentation of all routines and programs, and more. XITE uses its own image file format (BIFF), but comes with converters between BIFF and TIFF, pnm, sunraster, raw, MATLAB and ascii.

xshow, the main display program, works with images of arbitrary size and pixel type, on 8 bitplane PseudoColor and 24 bitplane DirectColor and TrueColor X11 displays. The images may be scaled, zoomed and panned. Look up tables may be selected from a menu of predefined and userdefined LUTs. The LUTs may also be specified in a histogram window.

The user may design menus of programs and activate a program by selecting the program from the menues. If the result of the program is a new image, this will appear as a new window on the display. In this way xshow works as a graphical interface to the program library.

The available programs include operations such as statistics, merging, resampling, arithmetic/logical/relational operations, rotation, mirroring, affine transformations, convolution, filter design, Fourier/Hartley/Haar/Hough transforms, color manipulation, histogram transformations, global and local thresholding, binary thinning, edge detection, morphological operations, classification, image analysis and texture estimation.

A toolkit is supplied to simplify writing X11 based applications.

Platforms

XITE runs on (at least) the following platforms

File format

The file format is a raster format for 2D and 3D images. In case of 3D, the image is viewed as a sequence of bands, the image may contain any number of bands. Each band may have its own size and pixel type. The image file contains the neccessary parameters (e.g. sizes and pixel types), pixel data ordered band by band, line by line; any amount of textual data, regularly used to store the processing history of the image; and finally any amount of other data. An internal C data structure is also defined, able to hold the whole image, information as well as pixels. The individual pixels are accessed by normal indexing. Simple routines are used to read (write) a whole image from (to) file or a channel, more complex routines are provided if you want to access only a part of the file.

Programs

Routines

All routines are written in C, and you will find

Documentation

Manual pages are supplied for all functions and programs, in "man" format as well as html. A User's Manual and System Administrator's Manual are included as PostScript documents and available in html format from the XITE WWW homepage.

Time consumption

The algorithms below are tested on images of size 512x512x1 byte. Time consumption (user time) is measured by the program "time" under UNIX, and displayed in seconds.
Algorithm D5 S10 PLin Alph Indy Pow U1
convolution 3x3 0.78 0.6 0.55 0.149 0.107 0.129 0.13
convolution 7x7 8.96 3.9 2.36 2.119 1.168 1.625 0.86
sobel 0.50 0.2 0.28 0.096 0.070 0.083 0.04
median 3x3 1.50 0.8 0.41 0.302 0.239 0.486 0.21
median 11x11 3.80 1.9 1.01 0.788 0.595 1.127 0.48
mean 3x3 0.60 0.6 0.23 0.120 0.164 0.125 0.12
mean 11x11 0.60 0.6 0.23 0.126 0.166 0.125 0.12
minarea 11x11 0.91 0.5 0.30 0.265 0.129 0.196 0.08
2D FFT float 9.59 3.7 1.85 1.130 1.267 1.256 0.64
where the machine types specified in each column are and the commands for each algorithm are

How to get the software

You can get the software with a WWW browser from http://www.ifi.uio.no/~blab/Software/Xite/ or with anonymous ftp from ftp.ifi.uio.no (presently 129.240.64.41). A "README" file gives further instructions.
  % ftp ftp.ifi.uio.no
  Name (ftp.ifi.uio.no): anonymous
  Password: (your e-mail address)
  ftp> cd pub/blab/xite
  ftp> ascii
  ftp> get README
  ftp> quit
  %

Updated by Svein Bøe.