History

TINA open source image analysis environment

Once apon a time there was a computer vision research and development tool called TINA, or There Is No Alternative. At least that's what historians say (the truth may have been lost in the mists of time). Tina provided (and still provides ) a great deal of computer vision functionality for rapid prototyping of new computer vision algorithms. TINA can be found at https://www.tina-vision.net/ .

Tina has been written by a large number of developers over a long period of time. It's in C and isn't the most reliable of tools ;-). Its also not something which can be readily used to develop new user applications.

Viarga is a really good alternative

So about 2000-ish, along comes Viarga, which stands for Viarga Is A Really Good Alternative! Viarga was founded and maintained by Stuart Meikle. In late 2000, Viarga was renamed to Mimas and maintainence was taken over by Bala Amavasai.

Mimas started life as a C++ computer vision library which can be called by user applications.

Note: The name Mimas comes from one of Saturn's moons. See here for more information. Consider that "I have worked on a vision library" doesn't sound as good as "I have worked on Mimas".

Mimas and more to come

Currently functionality is somewhat complete and there is a reasonable implementation of the base classes required for computer vision tasks - image, hough transform, vector, line, simple tracking, active contours, object recognition, image capture etc.

Mimas's website is at https://www.shu.ac.uk/mmvl/research/mimas/. This code is likely to change a lot in the future! We welcome any comments and suggestions.

mimas 2.1

Copyright Mon Oct 30 11:31:17 2006, Bala Amavasai, Stuart Meikle, Arul Selvan, Fabio Caparrelli, Jan Wedekind, Manuel Boissenin, ...