Vips/ip Image Processing package

See the Wikipedia article on VIPS. Below is a historical description from 1996:

Birkbeck College and The National Gallery have produced an image processing package which makes best use of Unix features to process enormous colorimetric images. It has been used in ESPRIT projects: VASARI, MARC and MUSA as well as in several museums and galleries around the world. It is particularly useful for mosaicing images and is popular for infra-red assembly. One important feature is that despite its advanced possibilities it can be used to teach image processing programming as a simple memory-mapped operation allows the use of pointers (just like the good-old framestore days!).

Some of the features of this package are:

• Uses file mapping for image access
• Uses little RAM to process huge images because virtual memory is used
• Pels can be char,short,int,float,double,complex any number of bands
• Images can be in files or memory with the same C programming
• Pels can be RGB, XYZ, Lab or LCH, including a quantised 32 bit Lab
• Partial processing allows groups of functions to use small intermediates
• ip User Interface (Motif) allows spreadsheet-like easy development
• ip can chain together functions into demand-driven partial processing
• ip can call user's library functions
• Multiprocessor SUNs are used automatically for efficient speed-up
• functions include arithmetic, filtering, fourier domain, colour etc
• defines a new internal fast file format and can read TIFF
• runs under Solaris 1.x 2.x (incl. Intel) and SGI IRIX

The file mapping allows VIPS to work on images which are much larger than available memory. Many packages try to allocate huge amounts of RAM and incur heavy speed penalties for large images. We regularly process images of 500MBytes with only 64MB of RAM.

The large amount of data types, from bytes to complex floating point, allows rounding-free processing using the minimum of space.

Examples

Here are some examples of vips/ip at work:

screendump (94k) of ip viewing a large image (Master of Leisborn)
screendump (92k) of ip viewing a large image (Rogier van der Weyden)
Example of an image processing sequence in ip
Demonstration of infra-red mosaic balancing
Example of VIPS C code

Contacts

See our repo on github

libvips website
Electronics and Computer Science Dept.
University of Southampton, UK
email: km@ecs.soton.ac.uk