Want to build a dedicated BPM maker

[Jason Quinn]

Hi, guys. I'm considering to develop a dedicated bad pixel mask generator. I'd like it to be as cross platform as possible. The basic functionality and operation of the program will be the following:

1) display a FITS image
2) use the mouse to click and toggle pixels as flagged/not flagged
3) use the mouse to draw regions to toggle pixels
4) a menu bar with obvious operations to flag pixels
5) save the flagged pixels as a FITS image

The problem is that my GUI programming experience is extremely limited and mostly limited to small Java and TCL applications, and none of them have had functionality that displays and interacts with an image.

Is there any advice you can offer as to which language and toolkits could be most appropriate to my endeavor? Or even alert to me a program that does this already if I'm unaware of it.

Jason

[fitz]

Hi Jason,

There may be some functionality in the DS9 'regions' menu that can be of use, but answers depend on what you mean by 'cross platform'.

Basic image display and interaction could be done within a script with standard tasks like DISPLAY and TVMARK, perhaps reading the CL 'imcur' parameter to read image cursors to implement commands to flag pixels or set region types. This would also allow you to use e.g. IMEXPR to create mask values given a threshold value, or some of the many other tasks to deal with masks (see "cl> references mask" for a list). This is of course a script and perhaps a bit clunky, but a PyRAF script might let you add some GUI elements using Tk.

The Client-Display Library (CDL) in X11IRAF is a C library that lets you display and mark images on XImtool/DS9, this could be used from a TCL app or wrapped with JNI if you wanted to use Java, but then you're left to implement a lot of the mask making/writing functionality yourself.

This sounds like an interesting app and Frank may have some other ideas, if you want to keep things in IRAF then you might consider a number of smaller tasks to do specific things e.g. automate the masking of saturated stars but allow interactive toggling of individual pixels. Hope this helps.

Cheers,
-Mike

[Jason Quinn]

[valdes]

Creating BPM masks interactively is like a paint program. A nice specialized task like that would be nice. Maybe some interface between a real paint program and creating the mask would be useful.

My solution was to make a slightly more specialized version of the older imedit called bpmedit. It was added fairly recently. You should look at it and consider the specializations I found useful. Some of the specializations were actually added to imedit (now called ximedit) such as painting vectors and mask above or below some level.

So I would certainly welcome a super convenient BPM painting program but I think bpmedit is reasonable for what I do.

Frank Valdes