[News] Visualisation tools: roadmap

[Emmanuel Bertin]

Dear AstroWISErs,

please find below our proposed roadmap for the AstroWISE image visualisation tool to be
developped by Frederic Magnard:

First milestone (proposed deadline: November 17, 2003):
* Investigate OpenGL-based approach (for both software and hardware supported implementations)
* Release a first fully operational prototype of the image visualisation tool including:
- a fast, POSIX-compliant, QT or Gnome-based, C/C++ display engine with
   - smooth scrolling
   - native support for true colour and palletized displays
   - large (3x2^16 elements), non-linear floating-point RGB lookup-table to allow for
     an extremely large dynamic range in intensity (160dB or more)
   - adjustable RGB LUTs using B-splines
   - compensation for monitor gamma, adjustable in the preferences with built-in calibration tool
   - intelligent default flux scaling when loading images
   - simultaneous handling of 10 frames or more
   - ultra-fast blinking between frames (X11 backstore)
   - optimized MEF and 3D FITS (data-cube) support.
   - handling of very large images thanks to memory mapping
   - flexible real-time magnifier
   - zoom with binning or decimation options
   - image flipping and rotation
   - frame tiling
   - pixel and world coordinate display
   - configurable Postscript and PNG/JPEG/TIFF export function
- The display engine shall take advantage of SIMD features (MMX/SSE/3Dnow!/SSE2) and 64bit support
  in modern processors to maximize efficiency.

Second milestone: (proposed deadline: November 2004):
* Second major release (besides regular updates)
- Overlay features with
   - Handling of regions (define, load, sace)
   - Coordinate grid overlay
   - Geometric measurements (distance)
   - Cut graphs
- Catalog overlay
   - Support for local catalogs in ASCII format
   - Automatic Name-matching (CDS?)
   - Region-based Image queries (DSS, CFHT, HST,...)
   - Source Catalog queries (GSC, USNO, SIMBAD,...)
   - Alternate highlighting/selection either on image or on the source list.
- Interactive Image analysis
   - Local image statistics.
   - Gaussian fit to selected sources

Third milestone: (proposed deadline: November 2005):
* Investigate integration as a web-browser plugin, for remotely examining arbitrary parts of
  large compressed images

Cheers,
				Emmanuel.