Creating powerful scripts for repetitive tasks, custom analysis, or specialized image processing has never been easier!
This
Brief describes Mira's scripting language which is integrated into
Mira MX Ultimate Edition and
Mira Pro Ultimate Edition.
Scripting capability can be added to Mira Pro and Mira MX by doing a platform upgrade
to the Ultimate Edition software.
The Mira MX scripting platform provides more than 1000 functions and Mira Pro scripting platform includes some 600 functions for working with images and other data as well as other tasks unrelated to data or the Mira software. Mira allows you to develop and implement custom analyses and processing procedures that run at the speed of your computer rather than at the speed of an interpreted language.
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For Mira Users: Sample Scripts you can download.
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What to expect: Scripting Benchmarks
Mira scripts have access to tools in the Mira GUI but also may be independent of the GUI. Your script might operate on displayed images or plots or it could perform specialized image processing and display the result. Alternatively, a script also can perform computations that do not involve other Mira features. For example, you might setup a customized image processing pipeline that works with images in files. Or you might perform some particular type of filtering or measurement of a displayed image set, then analyze and plot the results. You might even write a simple script that updates the calendar for your class syllabus.
Prototyping and implementing custom image processing
solutions has never been easier. Using Mira, you spend less time
learning a language and more time analyzing results. With
Mira scripts,
scientific and technical users with even modest experience in C, C++, Java, Perl, or even
Basic will find it surprisingly easy to write scripts that do serious
work.
The Mira's scripting module is far more than just a script interpreter supplemented by "toolkit". By extending the Lua programming language with Mira's rich core of advanced image processing tools, Mira makes it both faster and easier for you to get to the bottom line: RESULTS. Lua provides a rich syntax with advanced capabilities that are there if you need them, but not required if you don't. In addition, when used as a scripting language, Lua has been shown to be one of the fastest available.
This article gives a semi-technical review of modern scripting languages, with a focus on the benefits of Lua.
Mira greatly reduces the learning curve required of competing products, helping scientists and engineers to create powerful, effective software solutions with minimal effort getting "up to speed". All tools provided with Mira are pre-compiled for maximum performance and user scripts are compiled in real time to execute procedures that run at top speed — a huge benefit for mission critical applications and computations involving large images and image sets.
Script Classes and Functions
Listing Image Information Applying a Filter Kernel to an Image
Key Benefits
Mira's scripting facility is designed for scientists and engineers in image processing applications. Mira helps you implement complex procedures with less time learning a language, fewer bugs, and with faster execution than with any competing platform.
- Mira is designed around the premise that the typical user is trained in a technical field but is not a software engineer. Within minutes of first use, a typical Mira user can be writing scripts that actually do something useful. Never would you think that so much could be done with so little code!
- Mira implements the Lua language, which is a full-featured programming language. Lua has been shown to be one of the fastest executing script languages available.
- Scripts access Mira's extensive core of fast, optimized mathematical algorithms and array processing code.
- Provides outstanding GUI-level interaction between scripts and Mira's rich collection of data processing and visualization tools.
- Scripts can include code from external packages and extension modules on the fly, drawing from a rapidly expanding collection of commercial and open source tools.
- Mira accelerates the creation of complex procedures. Scripts compile on the fly and run with minimal processing overhead.
- Mira is truly feature-rich. In addition to the core capabilities of the Lua language, Mira's scripting module adds dozens of built-in classes and 600 to 1000 functions for processing, displaying, calibrating, and measuring images and other data.
- Dozens of useful scripts samples are included to get you up to speed. These can be modified and used as templates for your own scripts.
What's Included?
The following items are included with the scripting facility.
Mira
MX and Mira Pro script modules. Scripting is integrated into
the Mira Pro and Mira MX software platforms, including an interactive development
environment.- Electronic "Help" Documentation. For detailed on-screen help, Mira includes a standalone User's Guide in the Windows' standard CHTML format.
- Sample Scripts. To help you get up to speed fast using scripts,
Mira includes dozens of profusely commented sample scripts that do
useful things to illustrate the script tools.
These
scripts can be used as a template by modifying them to meet your own scripting needs. The
samples range from simple to complex and demonstrate a broad spectrum of
applications. - Mira Script User's Guide. This optional 500+ page guide documents more than 600 script functions, classes, and methods, including several hundred script examples.
Recommended Reference (not included)
Programming in Lua, Second Edition, ISBN 85-903798-2-5, by Roberto Ierusalimschy. This authoritative guide to the Lua language was written by its principle architect. Disarmingly straightforward and easy to follow, this masterful work is a "must have" for learning the power of the Lua language.
Lua Programming Gems, ISBN 978-85-903798-4-3, ed. Luis Henrique de Figueiredo, Waldemar Celes, and Roberto Ierusalimschy. Numerous experts author chapters on programming techniques, algorithms, data structures, extending Lua using modules, and other topics.