Gerbil

This software consists of a new interactive visualization tool targeted at multispectral and hyperspectral image data, and a toolbox of common algorithms, e.g. for segmentation. See the Documentation for details.

Release 0.3.0, April 03, 2012

This release is an important step for Gerbil to be used in productive environments.
Drawing speed is increased by magnitudes, meaning that Gerbil runs smoothly on much more machines now. You can now inspect images of higher spatial resolution without long delay or lock-up problems.
Second, drawing quality has improved significantly, especially when multiple labels are used during the session. Gerbil is much more beautiful now, and by that gives a more useful depiction of the spectral distribution in the image.
To make this possible, the minimum Qt version requirement had to be bumped; note however that Gerbil will be even faster if you use Qt 4.8, as compared to Qt 4.7.
An overall polish of the software, mostly in respect to its user interface, accompanies aforementioned significant improvements. Gerbil is now ready for new analysis features to be introduced in the next release!

Full list of changes:

Library compatibility:

• minimum Qt version requirement is now 4.7
• workaround for bug in OpenCV 2.3.1 that made Gerbil lock-up on startup

Drawing improvements:

• draw with vertex buffer objects (huge speed gain!)
• vectors are drawn in random order to avoid different spectral signatures, labels interfere with each other
• highlights always stay in foreground (using depth buffer)
• automatically draw w/o antialiasing during mouse interaction
• automatically draw reduced view during resize operations (smooth resizing)
• reduce redundant drawing during startup and folding of viewports

New features:

• screenshot functionality
  • use <CTRL>+'s' to take a screenshot of whole window
  • use 's' to take a clear (no highlights) screenshot of a single plot
• drawing can be done w/o antialiasing for speedup (press <SPACE> to toggle)
• spectral distribution view and spectral gradient view can be folded in
• user-selectable transparency value of label/seed point coloring
• keyboard shortcut for drawing of means/bin centers moved from <SPACE> to 'm'

Bugfixes:

• better error handling on loading/saving labeling/seed files
• bugfix for loading binary labelings, improvement on pseudo-binary labelings
• bugfix for reading non-square .lan images
• bugfix: prevent segfault in a very rare, unpractical scenario
• bugfix: configure.sh would overwrite variable descriptions

Smaller GUI improvements:

• viewports don't show highlight when inactive
• several window layout/spacing improvements
• text on graphseg go button
• nice background pattern for disabled views
• don't disable full dockwidgets, only their contents

Smaller background improvements:

• qgerbil accepts labeling file as optional second argument on the command line
• automatically add .png extension if none given in file save dialog
• less memory consumption during spectral gradient creation
• better method of determining axis legend width
• configure.sh lets CMake build in Release type by default