Revision as of 12:01, 1 June 2006

Introduction

Mimas is a C++ real-time computer vision library for GNU/Linux. Mimas is open source, 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 the parts, which are only relying on ImageMagick, fftw3 or Qt, can be compiled for MS Windows.

Downloads

Mimas-2.0

Download Mimas-2.0 ("A tremour in the force") 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.

Older releases

You can read older announcements here.

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
• Structural Invariant Feature Transform
• Graphical Programming with Mimas and Qt-Designer

The demonstrations are not part of the mimas-download!

Functionality

• Hough Transform
• Video Input

Image data

You will need these images to run the particle_filter examples. [Help required to upload .tgz file (around 30M) containing nearly 200 pictures on my computer ~/sourceCode] Don't forget to change the location of the images in the runMe files.

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.

See Also

• Realtime Linux
• Mimas Announcement Archive

External Links

• Sheffield Hallam University
  • Mimas page on official MMVL site
  • Online documentation
  • Access to tla/gnu-arch repository (currently no outside-access. Apache doesn't allow .archive-version to be read)
• Yahoo newsgroup
• Mimas at freshmeat.net
• Mimas at sourceforge.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!
• Publicity
  • Mimas on the CMU Computer Vision page!
  • Mimas at roborealm.com!
  • Mimas on robots.net!