Abstract
Image and signal analysis applications are substantial in scientific research. Both open source and commercial packages provide a wide range of functions for image and signal analysis, which are sometimes supported very well by the communities in the corresponding fields. Commercial software packages have the major drawback of being expensive and having undisclosed source code, which hampers extending the functionality if there is no plugin interface or similar option available. However, both variants cannot cover all possible use cases and sometimes custom developments are unavoidable, requiring open source applications. In this paper we describe IQM, a completely free, portable and open source (GNU GPLv3) image and signal analysis application written in pure Java. IQM does not depend on any natively installed libraries and is therefore runnable out-of-the-box. Currently, a continuously growing repertoire of 50 image and 16 signal analysis algorithms is provided. The modular functional architecture based on the three-tier model is described along the most important functionality. Extensibility is achieved using operator plugins, and the development of more complex workflows is provided by a Groovy script interface to the JVM. We demonstrate IQM’s image and signal processing capabilities in a proof-of-principle analysis and provide example implementations to illustrate the plugin framework and the scripting interface. IQM integrates with the popular ImageJ image processing software and is aiming at complementing functionality rather than competing with existing open source software. Machine learning can be integrated into more complex algorithms via the WEKA software package as well, enabling the development of transparent and robust methods for image and signal analysis.
Highlights
How the IQM framework can be extended via operator plugins and how it integrates with standard open source software for image processing and machine learning
We have presented IQM, a versatile and extensible open source software application written in Java
We provided insight into the functionality for image and signal analysis and gave an overview of the most important user interface components
Summary
IQM: Open Source Image and Signal Analysis parts of existing applications This is a commonly known issue and researchers have to write their own code for each specific problem [1]. Due to these drawbacks of commercial software, the number of open source users has increased during the last decade. One important aspect in increasing productivity is having an existing framework that already provides functionality for common and frequent actions like loading and saving relevant file formats Such tasks, are not directly related to the scientific or algorithmic problem, but may hamper progress tremendously. A proof-of-concept analysis is presented, demonstrating how users can benefit from the unique characteristic of combined image and signal processing in a single portable open source tool. For further details on the sections, we kindly refer the reader to the supporting information as well as the detailed user guide available from the project website http://sf.net/projects/iqm/files/3.2/ IQM3.2_userguide.pdf
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