Mira Product Brief

Image display is the core of any image processing software. With Mira, display of images is only one of many ways of understanding your data. There are also 1-D and 3-D visualization capabilities, contour plots, and other tools to help you understand your image data. This Brief describes only the display of traditional 2-D images.

Mira's “standard” display capabilities go well beyond “standard” grayscale and color image display. Mira 6 has the best image display routines available in any Windows compatible software at any price. Features such as smooth, real time contrast stretching of palettes, infinitely versatile pseudo-color palette enhancement, and high-speed image animation are just some of the many outstanding image display tools in Mira. Interactive contrast and pseudo-color stretching in Mira is incredibly smooth and simple to do—just roam the mouse over your image to dynamically adjust the contrast, brightness, and gamma of any grayscale or pseudo-color palette. If you are animating a stack of, say, 50 images, then contrast stretching and palette adjustments are also immediate, while the animation proceeds through the stack. And if you need to contrast stretch an 8k x 8k image in real time, Mira will do it.

The Mira image display window is designed to be efficient, informative, and intuitive. Each image window can hold 1 to n images, where n is limited only by virtual memory. Mira users routinely open hundreds of images in a single window and work with them as a set.

Examples

At left is a Mira Pro Image window doing aperture photometry. The top border shows the Image Toolbar, which is a local command center that shows live thumbnail and tracking views, world coordinates, pixel coordinates, and the image value at the pointer. Left side buttons magnify, pan, and toggle roam and cursor modes for the dedicated image cursor (red). Other buttons measure centroid positions, statistics in a rectangle, distance and angle, plot the image value between two points, adjust the transfer function, and edit image header information. The 3 blue buttons toggle between the top image and all images for processing (p), measuring (m), and graphing (g) operations when the window displays an image stack. The Image Toolbar helps keep your focus on the image of interest.

On the left border is the Aperture Photometry Toolbar. This controls the aperture photometry mode for this window, including marking, moving, calibrating, adjusting apertures, and so on.

The right border of the window has a color map which displays the current palette mapping. As shown here, the palette is inverted (black is at top) to display the image as a negative. The color map is a hot region; mouse-down to stretch the contrast, brightness, and gamma, double-click to open the palette manager, or right double-click to reset palette changes.

In this example, we show a familiar 8-bit luminance image of "blobs". This image is spatially calibrated (i.e., it has a world coordinate calibration) using inch units. Measurements, plots, and coordinates are thus listed in both inch and pixel units.

On the left window border is the Point Measurements Toolbar, which is the user interface to the Point Measurement package in Mira MX. This toolbar shares many common buttons with other measurement toolbars, like those for measuring distances, angles, and others. In Marking mode (top button), a mouse click adds a marker and interrogates the image at the sub-pixel position of the click. Results are listed in a  Report window, which contains a table that can be manipulated in various ways for comparing and archiving its values. If the Image window contains an image set, you have the option to measure the current image or all images, depending on the state of the Measure flag (the (m) button on the Image Toolbar). This is typical of the way interactive measurements work in Mira.

This view shows an image window with a stack of 4 32-bit real images displayed with a grayscale palette. Animation is one of many impressive Mira features. It is indispensable for comparing images and examining images for differences or transient features. Mira's capabilities go well beyond “stacking”, availing all image processing and analysis tools to the stack. No stack preparation is required, and the images may have any bit depth or supported image format.

The bottom border shows the Animation Control Toolbar which provides controls for switching between images (blinking) and animating the image set at a specified frame rate. This toolbar is automatically opened when the window has more than 1 image.

The left window border shows the Image Set Toolbar [note: use menu commands in Mira AP]. This toolbar provides local control for adding, inserting, deleting, and swapping images in the image set. A typical GUI concept in Mira, these buttons duplicate menu commands so your focus can stay on target.