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.

Announcements

Mimas-2.0

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

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.