Revision as of 12:31, 21 March 2006

Introduction

Mimas is a C++ real-time computer vision library. It is easy to use and includes tools for edge detection, corner detection, various filters, optic flow, tracking, blob analysis, Web cam tools for real-time applications, and much more. It also includes many implementations of traditional algorithms such as Canny. It was developed for GNU/Linux but as the GUI is largely separate, porting to other platforms should be straightforward.

Announcements

Mimas-2.0

Mimas-2.0 was released on Mar 15th 2005

Release Notes

• On newer systems, you have to force linking with libgfortran to build the lapack-wrappers (see here for more)
• Mesa off-screen rendering may crash NVidia's X-servers. NVidia doesn't support OSMesa.
• You'll experience a memory leak on most X-servers, when switching between on- and off-screen using X11-pixmaps. Therefore OSMesa is the preferred method for off-screen rendering. The configure script automatically will select OSMesa, if it is supported by your X-server.

Change log

• The mm_-prefix was removed from all classes in favour of the mimas-namespace.
• Direct transformation algorithms from different YUV formats to greyscale have been implemented.
• Various video sources (virtually any video file, DVDs, VCDs, streaming formats) are now accessible with mimas::image_xineinput, which is using libxine. See viewVideo example for more.
• Image files are now read using ImageMagick (Magick++), which allows reading and writing of animated GIFs, DICOM stacks (8 bit at the moment), FAX, Postscript, PDF, MPEG, RAS, ... See viewImage example for more.
• Mimas is configured to use OSMesa for off-screen rendering, if it is present on the system.
• The Mimas library now is independent of Qt. The examples, which are using Qt, have been ported to Qt4. This allows the Mimas library to be used with Qt3- as well as Qt4-programs.
• The function-wrappers for Fourier transform are now supporting both single and double precision.
• Lapack-wrappers extended with Cholesky factorisation and determinants.
• An example for L-systems was implemented.

Mimas-1.4

Mimas-1.4 was released on Nov 21th 2005.

Release Notes

• RPM-files for Mandrake 10.2 are provided.
• Don't run the mesa example on NVidia cards, as it crashes NVidia's Xorg-servers at the moment :(

Change log

• Support for firewire digital cameras (accessed using libdc1394)
• shift and rotation estimation using the fourier transform

Mimas-1.3

Mimas-1.3 was released on Jul 29th 2005.

Release Notes

• No rpm-files are provided this time.
• "make install" now will install documentation and the compiled examples under /usr/share/doc/mimas-devel-1.3/

Change log

Notable changes include:

• Convolution for n-dimensional arrays and images and faster LSI-filters have been implemented.
• Operators for images have been added (f.e. "image3=(image1-image2)*3.0").
• 2D-image-iterators have been implemented.
• Support for mesa offscreen- and onscreen-rendering has been added.
• Object-recognition using moments was implemented.

Mimas-1.2

Mimas 1.2 released on Feb 28th 2005.

Release Notes

• The lib*.so-files have been moved to the rpm-devel-package. This is a bug-fix, which also resolved the problem with superfluous dependencies. The rpm-packages are for Mandrake 10.0 only.

Change Log

• type-traits for pixel-conversion
• new grabber class (video4linux)
• introduced boost uBLAS
• added wrappers for xml-library Xalan-C
• iterative pose-estimation for 3D-correspondences

Demonstrations

• Microscope Vision Software
• Ascii-art using mimas and aalib.
• Camera Surveilance
• Microscope Control Software
• Sugar Pushing
• Depth from Focus
• Registration of TEM images
• Gradient Based Motion Estimation
• Locating tungsten-tip by means of cross-correlation

The demonstrations are not part of the mimas-download!

Functionality

• Hough Transform
• Video Input

See Also

• Realtime Linux

Software Engineering

Mimas is using state-of-the-art software engineering. A variety of open-source tools and libraries is being used to develop Mimas:

1. GNU/Linux: Mimas is being developed for the Linux operating system. Mimas may run on other Posix4/UNIX systems as well.
2. Qt: The Qt-library developed by Trolltech is used for implementing graphical user interfaces.
3. Mesa: Mesa is used to utilise hardware acceleration for displaying graphical primitives and images. The OSMesa extension is used (if present) to do off-screen rendering.
4. STL: The software is making extensive use of the abstract data types provided by the Standard Template Library
5. Lapack: Mimas offers wrappers for accessing some functions of Lapack.
6. Boost: The Boost Library offers smart pointers to do exception safe programming, multi-dimensional arrays, template meta-programming, abstract data types for linear algebra and many other programming concepts. The Boost library is going to be part of a future C++ standard.
7. Magick++: Mimas uses Magick++ to load and save images.
8. Xalan-C and Xerces-C: Xalan-C and Xerces-C are the XML-related C++-libraries of the Apache Software Foundation. They can be considered as the most complete implementations of the XML- (extended markup language), XSD- (XML schema description) and Xpath- (XML path) standards.
9. doxygen and graphviz: The doxygen documentation system extracts inline-documentation from the C++ source code.
10. FFTW. The fftw-library is maybe the fastest library for performing discrete Fourier transforms.
11. popt: The popt-library was used to implement command-line interfaces.
12. xine: Mimas (version 2.0 and later) can access videos using libxine.
13. Gnuplot: Gnuplot is used for plotting functions.
14. cvs and gnu-arch: Earlier cvs was used for version control. Now gnu-arch is being used.
15. Gcc: gcc is the C++ compiler of the GNU project.
16. gstreamer: Mimas has a plugin for interfacing with gstreamer.
17. autoconf, automake and make: make, autoconf and automake are used to configure and perform the build of the software on various distributions of the Linux operating system.

External Links

• Sheffield Hallam University
  • Mimas page on official MMVL site
  • Online documentation
  • Read-only access to tla/gnu-arch repository
• Yahoo newsgroup
• Mimas at freshmeat.net
• Image databases
  • Amsterdam Library of Object Images (ALOI)
  • Stereograms of the Syntim team
• Download the animated Mimas-logo in 3GP-format for your mobile!