Subject: IMDISP image display software

From: [email-masked]
Date: 13 Nov 91 13:43:48 GMT

I'd like to give a plug for IMDISP, the image display and processing
program from JPL which is available by ftp from ames.arc.nasa.gov .
It gets better and better, and for those of us with DOS equipment it
can be a very useful tool.

I started using it with the Voyager CD-ROMs and Magellan images ftp'd from
ames. At first (version 4.4 or so) it was good for display but not much more,
but by now (version 7.7) there are a variety of enhancements, filters and
so on, the ability to rotate images, and merge buffers containing different
images. Taken with the ability to write batch files to create composite
images these can be very useful indeed.

As an example, I have recently been working with images of an object which 
shall remain nameless for the time being, in which the object is viewed from
above the pole and rotates under illumination from a single direction. This
was not original data, so in order to understand better what had been
published I scanned the hardcopy images, converted them to .TIF files, used
a TIFF viewer to get information on their sizes, then used IMDISP to view
them. The COPIM utility that comes with IMDISP lets you put a PDS header on
the file so IMDISP can read the .TIF image directly, which is very useful
since it can easily be used to view anything you want. Back to the mystery
object.... I selected the best images from the large published set, enhanced
them, rotated them by the appropriate amount to put the object in the same
orientation in each view, then assembled them in a mosaic and saved the screen
as a new image. Now instead of having a rotating object with illumination
>from the same direction I had a fixed object with illumination appearing to
move around it, which made visualization of its shape much easier. This sort
of manipulation of data is really useful, and before I had IMDISP I had no
easy way to do it. 

Thanks to Mike Martin for giving it to me in the first place, and to Ron
Baalke and colleagues for their great work on it and for making it so
readily available. 

Phil Stooke