LIMP: Large Image Manipulation Project

What LIMP does now is only the tip of the iceberg. The basic foundation has been laid, but many algorithms remain to be written. Every area of LIMP will most likely receive extensions as work progresses. Of course, the people who contribute to LIMP and OSRS are the people who will drive the development. I will outline some of the planned work to give ideas of the kinds of things I believe would be useful. This is not an all-inclusive list, as there are likely many interesting features which have yet to occur to me.

Support for geographic information needs to be added at some level to allow applications to learn how images are related to the real world and each other. This is a basic requirement for high-level GIS programs. It may not be necessary to put this information directly into LIMP, but the metadata information in an image provides a potentially convenient way of storing and retrieving such information.

The classes from LIMP's image viewer will be extended to handle multiple overlapping images as well as vector data. This is also somewhat detached from the core of LIMP, because it would create a new display pipeline. The image display class already consists of a sophisticated drawing class, which is capable of ordering and computing tiles for the display with minimal impact on the GUI. This impact can be reduced to almost nothing once Qt supports threaded event handling.

A wide variety of radiometric image adjustments will be useful. These will start as simple histogram stretches for viewing, and progress to more complex color and intensity modifications. This type of modification should add very little extra overhead to LIMP, as it was designed specifically to minimize the procedural and computational overhead of such objects.

For a more complete list of expected modifications to LIMP, see the TODO file in the LIMP distribution. Similarly, if you are interested in the progress, see the NEWS and ChangeLog files.

As with most libraries that cater to processing extremes, LIMP is not destined for a mass-market audience. Good solutions for dealing with similar image-processing demands, such as editing, already exist. The problems facing a designer of a general editing program, where every pixel may be changed interactively, are not driving our choices. Instead, LIMP is designed to deal well with scientific image-processing needs. In this category, I am most familiar with aerial and satellite image processing, but I imagine other fields have similar needs.

Images for the GIS market typically cover a large area with a relatively low image scale. One obvious potential parallel in another field would be small area images with higher image scales—as might be found in microscopy work. As everyone who has played with a fractal generator knows, if you zoom into an object far enough, the original object seen at that scale covers an incredibly immense area.

Aerial and satellite images have come to be processed and stored on computers only in recent history. As computers become more powerful and capable of accessing larger amounts of data, new attempts will undoubtedly be made to process and understand exponentially larger sets of data at even finer resolutions. LIMP is not expected to be a final answer to these problems, but is just an experiment in dealing with them while maintaining performance, ease of use and the sanity of its programmers.