Introduction

Mimas Toolkit 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-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

The demonstrations are not part of the mimas-download!

Functionality

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:

GNU/Linux: Mimas is being developed for the Linux operating system. Mimas may run on other Posix4/UNIX systems as well.
Qt: The Qt-library developed by Trolltech is used for implementing graphical user interfaces.
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.
STL: The software is making extensive use of the abstract data types provided by the Standard Template Library
Lapack: Mimas offers wrappers for accessing some functions of Lapack.
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.
Magick++: Mimas uses Magick++ to load and save images.
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.
doxygen and graphviz: The doxygen documentation system extracts inline-documentation from the C++ source code.
FFTW. The fftw-library is maybe the fastest library for performing discrete Fourier transforms.
popt: The popt-library was used to implement command-line interfaces.
xine: Mimas (version 2.0 and later) can access videos using libxine.
Gnuplot: Gnuplot is used for plotting functions.
cvs and gnu-arch: Earlier cvs was used for version control. Now gnu-arch is being used.
Gcc: gcc is the C++ compiler of the GNU project.
gstreamer: Mimas has a plugin for interfacing with gstreamer.
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.