VisionTutor is a computer vision course that is interfaced with Aphelion®. It is equivalent to a two semester course in image processing. This multimedia product contains lectures and laboratory experiments. The laboratory experiments interface directly with Aphelion® so that the user may see and evaluate the results.
There are site licenses available for Aphelion®. For a price of about 5 times the standard price of Aphelion®, a customer can get as many copies of Aphelion® as necessary to equip a set of computers for teaching or research purposes. A single point of contact has to be elected, to avoid too much administrative hassles, and a maintenance agreement is automatically included in the package.
Apart from the price, there is no difference between an academic and a commercial version of Aphelion®. There is a 40% discount for non-profit organizations.
It is possible to download a demo version of Aphelion® from the web. You just have to fill the form in the Download menu, and follow the instructions. This demo will have exactly the same capabilities than the standard Aphelion® Developer version. After 15 days, or 100 trials, it will stop. Sending a P.O. will almost automatically reset the system, without having to reinstall the software. You will be given a software key to transform an evaluation version into a permanent one
For a yearly fee, Aphelion® users have access to the hot-line, including email support, bug fixes, and new releases as they become available. A maintenance agreement is usually valid for a period of at least three years, even more. Site licenses are usually sold with a maintenance agreement. Customers who do not wish to enter into a maintenance agreement can get upgrade versions for about 1/3 of the original price. An upgrade is the most recent version of Aphelion®, including new documentation, new Image Processing operators, and GUI enhancements.
The following modules can be used with Aphelion®: Interface to the most common frame grabbers, VisionTutor, Recognition Toolkit from RSI, Image Montage Kriging Toolkit, 3D Image Processing and Display, and Stage Controller. These modules can be purchased from your local dealer or rep.
No, Fuzzy Logic Toolkit is part of the basic package. On the other hand, Recognition Toolkit is an optional module, and has to be purchased separately.
Image Understanding is not Image Processing. Image processing deals only with pixels. Image Understanding groups pixels into objects and then works with the objects and their related attributes.
Segmentation is a process of separating areas of an image into separate components. Two basic types of segmentation are region-based, where groups of similar pixels are grouped into regions or blobs, and edge-based, where edges or lines are placed between areas of the images that are dissimilar.
Aphelion®'s Operator library contains the latest state-of-the-art morphology Operators developed at Ecole des Mines de Paris.
16 bit Operators were designed for DOS and Windows 3.1 operating systems. With these OS's software can only access 64K of CPU memory making it difficult to program complex algorithms without using paging. 32-bit algorithms are designed for the Windows 95/98/Me and NT/2000/XP environments. Therefore the code for the algorithms may be up to 2 GB without requiring any CPU / Disk paging. 32-bit Operators are more efficient.
Aphelion® supports real-time processing with the MMX set of instructions. Most of the basic Image Processing operators such as Arithmetic and Logic operations, convolution, erosion and dilation are implemented to take benefit of the MMX. It is planned to increase the number of operators using the MMX architecture in the future. It is currently not planned to port Aphelion® on special architecture, even if some functions have been ported on the PowerPC chip.
Yes, Aphelion® operators may be run from other Microsoft applications that support the COM technology, or that can call ActiveX components. For instance, you can call an Aphelion® operator from an Excel or Word macros. You can also develop a stand-alone application in Visual Basic, calling for the Aphelion® ActiveX components.
Yes, color-based segmentation is possible. The recommended approach is as follows. Segment a derivative of the data such as hue or excess color space, instead of a color channel directly. First, run the ImgColorBands operator to create hue, saturation or luminance images and then segment the images separately. Experience has shown that the different bands provide different data that may not be obvious in the full-color image. This unique information may help to simplify the problem. We are also working on a new additional module named Color Segmentation Module which will include powerful color segmentation techniques.
Yes, both file formats are the same.
Detecting overlapping objects is a difficult task. One solution is as follows. Use the Aphelion® Operator "ImgRegionGrow" to segment the objects from the background data. This algorithm starts with a seed and grows a surrounding region based on pixel values and stops growing when a set limit is reached. This method will retain each object's unique identity.
Aphelion® can process images of any size, digitized on 8, 16, 32 bits. Integer and floating-point images are supported, as well as gray-scale, color, and complex images. For image display, Aphelion® supports the notion of display context, which allows to display more than 8 bit images on the screen, with graphic overlay if required.
Aphelion® supports a wide variety of frame grabbers from vendors such as Imaging Technology, Integral Technologies, Matrox, Mutech, etc. A Twain driver is also available to interface a scanner, or any frame grabber which has a Twain interface. When using Twain, a 3rd window pops up to specify device parameters. The Windows Media driver available in Aphelion® lets you interface webcam and other video devices.
Aphelion® support TIFF, BMP, JPEG and KBVision images. An operator is also available to import raw data images. Most of non-supported images can be imported in Aphelion® via the import process.
There is a Porting Kit available as an optional module to interface non-supported frame grabbers. The Porting Kit describes all required functions to be developed. Developing a new driver will allow to acquire images from a camera hooked to the frame grabber, and to control gain/offset/LUT and other input parameters. Aphelion® also supports the Camera Link and IEEE 1394 protocols.
Aphelion® supports OLE communication with any OLE compliant software product. In standard, measurements computed within the software environment can be exported in Excel by just right clicking on the grid used to display object attributes. From the Visual Basic-compatible macro language, calls can be made to Excel, Word and other Windows compatible products. Many examples are provided with the software showing how to communicate with other software products.
Aphelion® automatically filters input images for you. For example, if you wish to process an inverse FFT, the list attached to the input images will only display complex images. If there are currently no complex images available in the GUI environment, then no images will be available. Usually image filtering is performed on binary, edge, and frequency images.
All Aphelion® documentation is available on-line. However, there are two PDF files provided on the Aphelion® CD-ROM which may be viewed and printed. These documents have been edited and reformatted to remove unnecessary blank pages and line feeds. These two documents are the User Guide and the Reference Guide.
Aphelion® supports the concept of projects. A project is an object in which most of the Aphelion® objects such as kernels, structuring elements, LUTs, neighborhood LUTs will be stored. Preferences such as window size and location, and images can also be saved in a project. When Aphelion® starts, a user project can then be automatically loaded.
Yes, it is possible. The macro named Aphelion.apm, placed in the Macros directory will be automatically loaded each time Aphelion® starts.
Actually, most of the Aphelion® operators have been ported from 2D to 3D, and are all gathered in the 3D Image Processing optional module. The format of a 3D image is the VTK format from Kitware, Inc. Aphelion® has tools to generate a 3D image from a series of 2D TIFF images. The ISR (ObjectSet) format has also be extended to 3D. Measurements such as volume, sphericity, intercept numbers, are available for 3D images. In addition to the 3D Image Processing module, there is a 3D Image Display module based on the VTK 3rd party product from Kitware, Inc.
In standard, the Aphelion® software product supports ActiveX components. All image Processing/Understanding operators can be accessed through ActiveX components, and a component for Image Display is also available. These ActiveX components can easily be called from Delphi or C++ Builder, or any product supporting the COM technology.
Calling a 3rd party ActiveX component from the Aphelion® Graphical User Interface (GUI) is very straightforward. A call to a Visual Basic function named CreateObject will actually establish a link between Aphelion® and the component, and all properties and methods of the component can then be accessed via the macro language.
In the Aphelion® ApxImage control, there is a method named Attach which maps an array of pixels to an Aphelion® image, without having to copy pixels from one array to another. It saves a lot of time, and it makes the process very straightforward.
Aphelion® libraries are available as DLLs which can be called from Visual C++ or other environments. In the latest version of Aphelion®, the libraries are also available as ActiveX components, which can be called from VC++, Visual Basic, Delphi, C++ Builder, Java, or any other software product which supports the COM technology.
The Aphelion® ActiveX components include eight Imaging Toolkits, with all the Imaging operators available in the Aphelion® GUI, three components for image and ObjectSet management, and one component named ApxImageDisplay. This control allows the display of all type of images, gray-scale and color, specify brightness and color, change LUT, zoom in and out, and display of graphic overlay. All actions on images performed in the Aphelion® GUI can be reproduced with the ActiveX control. Multiple instances of the control can be placed in the same form to mimic an Image Examiner software product, even with image yoking.
The best way to use the Aphelion® Image Processing/Understanding operators from Visual Basic is actually to call them from the ActiveX components. Just place a few Imaging Toolkits in a VB form, and then make calls to the ImgOperators.
There is an optional module available with Aphelion® to control the stage of a microscope through the serial port (COM1 or COM2). A BasicScript macro is provided as source code including a GUI, serial port functions, and other functions to actually move the stage in the X and Y directions. Autofocus is also available.
In optical microscopy, Aphelion® will usually be used
with a standard frame grabber and a camera mounted on top of the microscope.
The Aphelion® Stage Control Module will allow to control the motion of
the stage in X, Y and Z directions. Moreover, the Aphelion® Morphological
and Analysis Toolkits will permit to process images and to provide a set
of measurements such as shape, texture, size, etc. Graphics can be generated
inside Aphelion®, or exported through an OLE communication to Excel.
Most of the new Scanning Electronic Microscopes (SEMs) can now generate
TIFF images. Importing these images in Aphelion® is straightforward. For
older generation SEMs, special hardware is available to interface the device
with a PC, with drivers and ActiveX components. Functions of the ActiveX
control can then be called from an Aphelion® macro.